Sri Lanka among best places to be a mother in South Asia
Wednesday, 6 May 2015 01:23
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Sri Lanka is one of the best places in South Asia to be a mother, according to the State of the World Mothers-2015 Report of Save the Children global motherhood rankings.
The 16th annual State of the World’s Mothers report, which delves into a comparison of the health disparities between wealthy and poor women and children living in cities around the world, ranked Sri Lanka and the Maldives at 92 among 179 countries.
The five indicators in the 2015 Mothers’ Index are: the lifetime risk of maternal death; children’s well-being as measured by their under-5 mortality rate; educational status, as measured by children’s expected years of formal schooling; economic status, as measured by gross national income per capita; and political status, measured by women’s participation in national government.
According to the report, women in Sri Lanka face a 1 in 1,400 risk of maternal death from pregnancy-related causes while 9.6 children in 1000 die before their fifth birthday.
In South Asia, Nepal ranked 114, Bhutan at 122, Bangladesh at 130 in the index while India ranked at 140 and Pakistan at 149. Afghanistan ranked the worst in South Asia at 152.
Norway ranked at the top of the index with strong performance across all five dimensions of maternal and child health and wellbeing. Norway is the only country to place in the top 12 on all five indicators. Finland, Iceland, Denmark and Sweden rounded up the top five in that order.
Somalia remained the last for the second year in a row. Niger, Mali, Central African Republic Democratic Republic of the Congo and Somalia were the worst countries according to the report.
In developed countries, the United States continues to be outpaced by smaller countries in its treatment of its mothers, dropping two spots this year to 33rd place in the rankings.
Women in the United States face a 1 in 1,800 risk of maternal death, the worst odds of any developed country in the world, according to the report. Cites in the United States have some of the highest urban infant mortality rates in high-income countries, the report said.
