Child mortality ranks as one of the most recognized indicators of human development worldwide, serving as a benchmark in assessing a country’s overall progress towards development. While accurate and timely estimates of child mortality are critical to help countries set priorities, design programmes and monitor progress, they remain very difficult to capture - especially in developing countries where data on child mortality are often scarce.

In response to these complexities, the
Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation

During its initial years, however, the child mortality estimates published by the IGME were sometimes challenging to understand, particularly in how they related to nationally-produced data. Enter CME Info - short for Child Mortality Estimates Info – a comprehensive data portal launched by the IGME explicitly to unveil the mystery behind the derivation of national child mortality estimates.

Available at www.childmortality.org, CME Info uses leading-edge DevInfo database technology to portray international trend estimates for child mortality and explain how national data are used to generate internationally recognized estimates. National estimates compiled by the IGME from reliable and representative data are used to generate a regression curve fitted to these data points and then extrapolated to produce trends. Users can see how data from different surveys – some conflicting – are best interpreted to make sound estimations for child mortality trends.

These country estimates are then made publicly available on CME Info, where users can easily access national estimates on country maps, generate graphs, view data series and their uncertainty ranges, and compare estimates across different countries.