Norway is the best place in the world to raise children.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: Norway ranks as the world’s best location to be a mother, leagues ahead of the United States which dropped to 33rd spot on the annual list released by Save the Children.
The report, which was released on Monday, rates 179 countries based on five indicators related to maternal health, education, income levels, and the status of women.
Scandinavian nations have consistently taken the highest spots in the Mothers’ Index, with Norway supplanting Finland — which held the top spot last year — in 2015’s rankings. Among the top 10, Australia is the only non-European country, at number nine.
The ten worst places are all sub-Saharan African countries, with Somalia listed as the worst place for mothers, just below the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic. Nine of the bottom ten countries are afflicted by ongoing conflict.
Disparately, in the top 10 countries, one mother out of 290 will lose a child before the age of five. In the bottom 10, that rate comes in at one in eight.
American women have a one in 1,800 risk of maternal death, the worst level of risk of any developed country in the world, according to the report. An American woman is more than 10 times as likely to die in childbirth than a Polish woman, noted the Agence France-Presse.
Save the Children also looked at infant mortality rates in the world’s 24 wealthiest capital cities and found Washington D.C. to have the highest rate at 7.9 deaths per 1,000. Alternately, Stockholm and Oslo maintain infant mortality rates at or below 2 deaths per 1,000.
Cities in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Ghana, India, Kenya, Madagascar, Nigeria, Peru, Rwanda, Vietnam and Zimbabwe have the highest gap for child survival, reported AFP, with destitute children three to five times more likely to die than their affluent peers.