Given Hapunda

202 Figure 2: Nutritional status of South African children aged between 1 and 6. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) aimed at reducing poverty, hunger and disease by 2015 to ensure that children grow up healthy and develop to their full potential. There has been improvement in the past 15 years as it was reported that child mortality was reduced with less than half between 1990 and 2015, however mortality rate of 5.9 million of the children is still observed. Of these deaths, 81% were of children under five years of age (UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation, 2015:3-6). The challenge is mainly around birth period as 45% of death occurs in the first 28 days of life and almost half of under-five deaths are concomitant with under-nutrition. Prevalence and trend of child mortality is indicated in Figure 3 (UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation, 2015).