The world my father told me about 50 years ago was a divided world. It looked like this. Each bubble is a country. Size is population.
Blue, Africa. Red, Asia. Yellow, Europe.
And green, Africa. the Americas. Vertical is child mortality, from 30% of children dying before the age of five down to almost zero child death.
Horizontal, number of babies born per woman, from eight to less than two. But most countries were up here. Women had six to seven children.
Child deaths were frequent. Almost every family lost one or more children. In many people's mind, the world still looks like this, developing and developed. But it's a myth, because the world has improved immensely in the last 50 years. Here we go.
Year by year, child mortality fell in almost all countries. And as child mortality fell, we... women chose to have fewer and fewer babies, and that enabled them to invest more time and resources in each child. By 1990, some of the so-called developing countries had already made it down here.
Some were in between, and a few remained up here with very high child mortality. Ethiopia had hardly moved at all. It had passed through decades of famines and political turmoil.
Many people think that Ethiopia is still stuck. up here. But look what happens after 1990. With improved access to health service in rural areas and well-spent aid, child mortality falls dramatically in Ethiopia. And with better access to family planning, women choose to have fewer and fewer babies.
Ethiopia has come halfway and is moving quickly down to this corner. But Ethiopia still faces many challenges. I will split the Ethiopian bubble.
The capital, Addis Ababa, is already done. down here. But the remote Somali region of Ethiopia still have high child mortality. But most of the regions, 90% of the population, are centered around the average. Most people think that the problems in Africa are unsolvable.
But if the poorest countries can just follow the path of Ethiopia, it's fully possible that the world will look like this in 2030. Then there will be no countries left in the books. we once called the developing world. But to ensure that that happens, we must measure the progress of countries. It's only by measuring we can cross the river of myths.