Mumbai: The UN has warned that 69 million children under five will die from preventable causes if the world does not focus more on the plight of disadvantaged people.

The UN children’s agency Unicef, in a report released in Mumbai on Monday, also said based on current trends, 167 million children will live in poverty and 750 million women will have been married as children by 2030, the target date for the Sustainable Development Goals, if no action is taken.

The State of the World’s Children (SOWC), Unicef’s annual flagship report, paints a stark picture of what is in store for the world’s poorest children if governments, donors, businesses and international organisations do not accelerate efforts to address their needs.

Maharashtra Governor, Vidyasagar Rao on Monday released the digital version of the SOWC report 2016 and said, “Providing every child with a fair chance is the essence of equitable development. As this SOWC report shows, promoting equity is a practical and strategic imperative to reduce the inequalities that undermine our society.”

Rajeshwari Chandrasekhar, Chief of Field Office, Unicef, Maharashtra, noted, “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. I believe that what happens in early childhood does not stay in childhood.”

According to her, the experiences children have in their early lives and the environment in which they undergo those experiences exert a lifelong impact on them.

“I would like to state that the rates of return on investments made during the prenatal and early childhood years average between 7 to 10 per cent greater than investment made at older ages.”

Therefore, she said, the need to give every child a fair start plus a fair chance in life is vital.

The report points to evidence that investing in the most vulnerable children can yield immediate and long-term benefits.

Globally, cash transfers, for example, have been shown to help children stay in school longer and advance to higher levels of education. On average, each additional year of education a child receives increases his or her adult earnings by about 10 per cent. Moreover, for each additional year of schooling completed by young adults in a country, that country’s poverty rates fall by 9 per cent.

The report notes that significant progress has been made in saving children’s lives, getting children into school and lifting people out of poverty. Global under-five mortality rates have been more than halved since 1990, boys and girls attend primary school in equal numbers in 129 countries, and the number of people living in extreme poverty worldwide is almost half of what it was in the 1990s.

But this progress has been neither even nor fair, states the report. The poorest children are twice as likely to die before their fifth birthday and to be chronically malnourished than the richest.

Across much of South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, children born to mothers with no education are almost three times more likely to die before they are five than those born to mothers with a secondary education. Girls from the poorest households are twice as likely to marry as children than girls from the wealthiest households.

The Unicef report emphasises that when governments adopt policies, programme and public spending priorities that target the most deprived children, they can transform those children’s lives and their societies. But when they fail to focus on meeting the needs of the most marginalised, they risk entrenching inequities for generations to come.