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Standardized estimates

Global Data Explorer.

The health of the world’s mothers and children, measured the same way everywhere. Standardized indicators, comparable across countries and over time, so progress can be tracked and gaps made visible.

The situation

Where women’s and children’s health stands.

Care around birth has improved across most regions over the past generation, and more children survive to age five. Progress is uneven: some measures have stalled or reversed, and national averages conceal the children a health system does not reach.

Coverage is highest around birth: skilled attendance and at least one antenatal contact reach most women. It is lower for the later, more complete contacts — four or more antenatal visits, and postnatal care for mother and newborn in the high-risk days after delivery. These are independent estimates with different denominators, not stages tracked through one group of women.

For young children, low-cost treatments still do not reach everyone. Oral rehydration therapy for diarrhoea has risen by about seven percentage points over fifteen years. Care-seeking for pneumonia, one of the leading infectious causes of death in children under five, has declined since 2008. And antimalarial treatment is recorded more often than diagnostic testing, so a share of antimalarials are given without a confirmed diagnosis.

For adolescents, measurement is thinnest. Early childbearing is falling but remains over four times as common in the poorest fifth of households as in the richest. The behaviours that shape long-term health are measured intermittently, and for adolescent mental health there is no agreed global measure of whether those who need care receive it.

Read the topic explainers

Figures: UNICEF global databases, February 2026 aggregates; adolescent mental-health prevalence, UNICEF, 2019. Each figure links to the topic it summarises.

The headline resource

Country Profiles

Standardized maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health indicators for every country, on one comparable template — the same measures, defined the same way, so countries can be read side by side.

Find a country

Also here

What this hub will hold.

These are in development. Each is described below as a plan; none is built yet. The profiles are the live route to the data in the meantime.

  • Interactive data viewIn developmentQuery the indicators directly — pick a measure, a set of countries and a time range, and pull the numbers or a chart. Built on the same standardized indicators behind the profiles.In development. The profiles are the current route to the underlying figures.
  • Indicator dictionaryIn developmentWhat each indicator means, exactly: its definition, numerator and denominator, the recommended measurement, the data sources behind it, and how it aligns with WHO normative guidance.In development. Definitions currently live on each topic explainer.

The Global Data Explorer is maintained by the MNCAH Team in UNICEF’s Office of Strategy and Evidence — Innocenti.