UNICEF Danmark is to drop a television ad appeal following the discovery by the DR2 Detektor programme that its figures on children who die of diarrhoea and dehydration each day were inflated.

UNICEF has apologised for and criticised what it calls its ‘human mistake’.

The problem has arisen due to the statistics used to reach a conclusion that 5,000 children die each day of diarrhoea and dehydration.

When its advertisement was produced in the summer of 2011, the organisation used its own status report from 2007 which provided estimates of deaths based on data collected between 2000 and 2006. According to that report, some two million children under the age of five died each year – or an average 5,000 each day - from the two conditions.

But UNICEF has updated its figures since then. In May 2010, the organisation, which provides figures on child death for the United Nations, said that based on 2008 figures the number was 3,600, while figures released in 2012 based on 2011 showed the figure to be some 3,300 children.

“We have no interest in manipulating or inflating the figures. This is simply a human mistake,” UNICEF Danmark Information Executive Karin Aaen tells Detektor.

Aaen adds that it is difficult to find a good explanation for the mistake.

“There isn’t one, only that UNICEF is a large organisation and the experts and statisticians are not in the Communication Department,” Aaen tells Detektor.

“This is highly regrettable, and that is why we have removed the advertisement. But there are still some 3,000 children who die each day so we will continue to produce campaigns. But we will not make that mistake again,” Aaen tells Detektor.

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