Premature birth is the leading cause of death for children under 5 years old. It’s also quite common across the world—but the chance of survival depends on where a child was born. 

In low-income countries, an estimated half of all children born preterm will die, while nearly all would survive if they were born in a high-income country like the United States or Canada, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Most of these deaths can be prevented with access to basic medical services during and after pregnancy—yet this care that is inaccessible in some communities, including many of the places where Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) teams work around the world, such as Central African Republic (CAR) and Nigeria, where the mortality rate related to prematurity is 17 and 7 times higher than in Western Europe, respectively.