Forecasting under-five child mortality in Bangladesh: progress towards the SDGs target by 2030

In order to facilitate progress towards achieving the SDGs target regarding under-five child mortality in Bangladesh, the study explores the relevant mortality trends and makes a projection of the situation by 2030. The yearly dataset regarding mortality among children aged five and under (per 1,000 live births) in Bangladesh employed in this study was collected from the World Bank Databank (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator) for the 1972-2022 period. The selection of the best-fitted model for the purpose of forecasting was between the ARIMA model and the Double Exponential Smoothing Holt’s Method. Compared with the ARIMA (1,2,1) model, the Double Exponential Smoothing Holt’s method proved the best-fitted model for forecasting the under-five child mortality in the future. The results show that under-five child mortality in Bangladesh is an annually declining trend. The average under-five child mortality is forecasted to drop by one during the 2023-2035 period. Thus, the predicted value of under-five child mortality would be 26 in 2025 and 22 in 2030, which contributes to the achievement of the national target of 27 (per 1,000 live births) in 2025 and the SDGs target (25 deaths per 1,000 live births) regarding the under-five mortality rate. Bangladesh will then achieve the SDGs target regarding the under-five child mortality by 2026 if the existing strategy and plan of reducing under-five child mortality is successful.