The neonatal mortality rate is the probability that a child born in a specific year or period will die during the first 28 completed days of life, if subject to age-specific mortality rates of that period, expressed per 1000 live births. Neonatal deaths (deaths among live births during the first 28 completed days of life) may be subdivided into early neonatal deaths, occurring during the first 7 days of life, and late neonatal deaths, occurring after the 7th day but before the 28th completed day of life.

The United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (UN IGME) estimates are derived from nationally representative data from censuses, surveys or vital registration systems. The UN IGME does not use any covariates to derive its estimates (except in the case of neonatal mortality estimation, which incorporates the relatively more data-rich under-five mortality rate estimates in the modelling). It only applies a curve fitting method to good-quality empirical data to derive trend estimates after data quality assessment. In most cases, the UN IGME estimates are close to the underlying data. The UN IGME aims to minimize the errors for each estimate, harmonize trends over time and produce up-to-date and properly assessed estimates. The UN IGME produces neonatal mortality rate (NMR) estimates with a Bayesian spline regression model, which models the ratio of neonatal mortality rate / (under-five
mortality rate - neonatal mortality rate). Estimates of NMR are obtained by recombining the estimates of the ratio with the UN IGME-estimated under-five mortality rate. See the references for details.

Deaths per 1,000 live births

Total, Urban, Rural

Ministry of Health