Question to the Department for International Development:

To ask the Secretary of State for International Development, what progress her Department has made on Millennium Development Goals in relation to tackling (a) child mortality, (b) covid-19 and (c) other diseases.

The Millennium Development Goals expired in 2015 and were replaced by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which run until 2030. Significant progress has been made in recent decades on global health, for example the global neonatal mortality rate fell from 31 deaths per thousand live births in 2000 to 18 deaths per thousand in 2018, while the number of global malaria deaths fell from 840,000 to 405,000 over the same period.

The UK has played a strong part in this. UK investment in Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance since 2000 has supported the immunisation of 760 million children and contributed to preventing thirteen million deaths from vaccine-preventable diseases. The UK is also the second-highest country donor on malaria.

COVID-19 risks reversing these earlier gains. The UK is committed to supporting developing countries’ health systems to respond to COVID-19 and to achieving the health-related SDGs. We will do this with a particular focus on ending the preventable deaths of mothers, new-born babies and children by 2030 and also through increasing UK leadership on malaria.