This is the first Countdown report in the context of the 2030 agenda for sustainable development and the Every Woman Every Child Global Strategy for Women’s, Children’s and Adolescent’s Health (2016–2030). It synthesizes data on the current situation and trends in reproductive, maternal, newborn and child health and nutrition from a wide array of sources, including the profiles on the 81 Countdown priority countries, which together account for 95% of maternal deaths and 90% of deaths among children under age 5. Countdown to 2030 builds off the strengths of Countdown to 2015 and has evolved to best contribute to assessing progress towards universal coverage for women’s, children’s and adolescents’ health. It has retained a partnership based governance model with three main objectives: monitoring progress in the highest burden countries; improving the measurement of intervention coverage, equity and drivers of coverage; and strengthening capacity to collect, generate and use evidence at the regional and country levels. Countdown’s primary focus is the continuum of care, with some expansion into nutrition, adolescent health (currently limited to adolescent girls’ reproductive health), early childhood development, quality of care and effective coverage, and conflict settings.
Annexes A–H provide more detail on the Countdown structure, the conceptual model guiding its analyses, the technical review process that resulted in the 81 priority countries and the indicators included in the country profiles, the definitions and data sources for those indicators, and the list of Countdown countries considered malaria endemic and included in analyses of the malaria indicators.