A new report on global life expectancy by the World Health Organization, WHO, has rated Nigeria low.

The report also provided low figures for eight other countries, it showed that some countries on the continent have increased their life expectancy by almost 50% compared to what they had two decades ago.

In the report titled “World Health Statistics 2014” and published yesterday, life expectancy for both men and women is less than 55 years in the nine sub-Saharan African countries namely Nigeria, Angola, Central African Republic, Chad, Cote d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of Congo, Lesotho, Mozambique and Sierra Leone.

The yearly report is the definitive source of information on the health of the people across the world.

The report contains data from 194 countries on a range of mortality, disease and healthy system indicators including life expectancy, illness and death resulting from key diseases, health services and treatments , financial investments in health, as well as risk factors and behaviors that affect health.

Three African countries namely Liberia, Ethiopia and Rwanda are among the countries that made great progress with an average increase in life expectancy by 9 years from 1999-2012.

An important reason why global life expectancy has improved so much is that fewer children are dying before their fifth birthday WHO Director-General Dr. Margaret Chan said.

Liberians can now live 20 years older, from 42 years in 1996 to 62 years in 2012; Ethiopians too have increased their life expectancy by 19 years, from 45 to 64 years; Rwanda shot up by 17 years, from 48 to 65 years the reports said.

This according to the report is six years longer than the average global expectancy life for a child in poor rated countries like Nigeria.

She also said that ‘there is still a major rich-poor divide by people in high-income countries continue to have a much better chance of living longer than people in low-income countries’ she added.

The top three causes of premature deaths are coronary heart disease, lower respiratory infections (such as pneumonia) and stroke, while most deaths among children under five occur among children born prematurely according to the reports.

This is as even the report maintained that “pneumonia is responsible for the second highest number of deaths worldwide.”

Women in Japan have the longest life expectancy in the world at 87 years, followed by Spain, Switzerland and Singapore. Female life expectancy in all the top 10 countries was 84 years or longer.

The reports added that irrespective of where women live around the world, they live longer than men.