About 69 million children under five could die from mostly preventable causes, 167 million children will live in poverty, and 750 million women will have been married as children by 2030—the target date set for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs),  a report by Unicef said.

The report entitled “The State of the World’s Children” was  published on Tuesday and it depicts a grim picture on the plight of world’s poorest children in near future if they are denied a fair chance in life.

“Denying hundreds of millions of children a fair chance in life does more than threaten their futures—by fuelling intergenerational cycles of disadvantage, it imperils the future of their societies,” said Unicef Executive Director Anthony Lake.

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, according to the report.

The under-five mortality rate is almost three times higher in the case of children born to uneducated mothers compared to the children born to mothers with a secondary education in much of South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, the report read.

In Nepal, the under-five mortality rate has gone down to 36 from 141 per 1,000 live births since 1990. Primary school attendance among boys and girls is equal with 76 percent for each.

Likewise, the poorest newborns are 3.7 times less likely attended by skilled birth-attendant compared to the richest children in Nepal, according to the report.

Also, only 41 percent of the poorest has access to early childhood education. The figure stands at 84 percent in richest children in Nepal, the report mentioned.

The report states that cash transfers, for example, have been helpful in making the 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 percent. And, for each additional year of schooling completed, on average, by young adults in a country, that country’s poverty rates fall by 9 percent,” the report stated.