Stillbirths are an important but often neglected global health problem. Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia bear the greatest burden of these deaths.  

The costs of stillbirths go beyond the loss of life and include psychological cost such as maternal depression, financial costs to parents as well as long-term economic costs to society. The burden on families, especially women, is severe and long lasting, yet stigma and taboo hide this burden even in high-income countries. The progress in lowering the stillbirth rate in the past two decades is much slower than the reduction in mortality of children aged under 5 years old. This could be due to a variety of reasons including absence or poor quality of care during pregnancy and birth, lack of investment in preventative interventions and the health workforce, lack of social recognition of stillbirths as a burden on families, challenges with measurements and major data gaps, absence of global and national leadership, and no established global targets.
Number of stillbirths
Data availability and data quality is uneven among countries.  Adequate stillbirth data are lacking in many low and middle-income countries.  These countries do not have a functioning health information system or civil registration vital statistics (CRVS) system to count or capture stillbirths, and in others stillbirths are excluded from routine registration despite the existence of functioning systems. In such settings, household surveys provide important information on child mortality, but most surveys have substantial data quality issues for stillbirth.
Number of fetal deaths at 28 weeks or more of gestation
The UN IGME’s approach to estimate stillbirth rates (SBR) includes the following steps:
1.	Compile all available stillbirth data at a country level, derived from administrative sources, household surveys or population-based studies. 
2.	Evaluate data in accordance with the data quality criteria and produce adjustment or recalculation by applying standardized definitions. 
3.	Estimate global and country-specific trends of stillbirth rates using a smoothing time series model, supplemented with covariates associated with stillbirth rates. This process averages empirical data on stillbirths derived from the different sources for a given country. In the case of countries with sparse or no data, the identified covariates associated with stillbirth will inform the trend in stillbirth rate.