After its independence in the early 1960s, Kenya’s child mortality declined rapidly. Until about 1980, the under-five mortality rate (U5MR), the probability of dying by age five, fell at an annual rate of about 4 percent per annum. This rate of decline slowed in the early 1980s to about 2 percent per annum. Data from the 1998 Kenya Demographic and Health Survey (KDHS) show that, far from declining, the U5MR increased by about 25 percent from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s. This adverse trend coincided with a number of other adverse trends: stagnation in growth of per capita income, declining levels of immunization, falling school enrollment, and the emergence of an HIV/AIDS epidemic. One potentially positive trend was that fertility fell by about 30 percent from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s.