Behind the numbers on the Child Atlas are child whose lives are shaped by the decisions of policymakers, the reach of public services, and the crises unfolding around them. When realities shift, so must the data we use to understand them.

The Child Atlas – Save the Children's data platform to visualise, compare and analyse children's outcomes globally – is designed to be a living resource. This means data across the platform is continuously updated. For many indicators, this happens automatically, thanks to the great work of organisations such as UNICEF or the World Bank in making their data publicly accessible. For others, we run regular manual updates. Importantly, you can see beneath each visualisation, when exactly the data was last refreshed!

In just the last six months, indicators spanning a wide range of child rights have been updated – from mortality and poverty to hunger and malnutrition, inequality, civic space, corruption, conflict exposure, the cost of a healthy diet, food inflation, countries' health spending, school feeding and more.

There are many stories buried in these data series. Here are three:

1. Child stunting is rising again. After years of gradual decline, global rates of stunting (reflecting long-term chronic malnutrition and its impact on children's physical growth and development) have begun to increase over the last few years. In 31 countries, rates of stunting were higher in 2024 than at the start of the SDGs in 2015.
2. Extreme child poverty is falling globally, but not everywhere. The share of children living in households surviving on less than $3 a day has decreased from 24% in 2014 to 19% in 2024. That still leaves 412 million children in severely resource-constrained households. And in many conflict-affected and fragile countries, rates actually increased over this period. The Child Atlas also includes the latest estimates of multidimensional child poverty, capturing deprivations across education, health, nutrition and basic living conditions.
3. Health spending remains too low and too unequal. In more than two-thirds of countries, public spending on health is less than 5% of GDP, leaving large financing gaps on the road to universal health coverage. And that spending often fails to reach those who need it most: across 59 countries with available data, only 18% of health spending on average benefits the poorest 20% of the population – communities that typically face the highest mortality rates and lowest life expectancy.

We hope the Child Atlas continues to be useful in your work, putting key data at your fingertips. As always, we welcome your suggestions and feedback – get in touch.