Nigeria has became the world’s most dangerous country in which to give birth following the alarming maternal mortality.
According to BBC, the most recent UN estimates for the country, compiled from 2023 figures, one in 100 women die in labour or in the following days.
That puts it at the top of a league table no country wants to head. In 2023, Nigeria accounted for well over a quarter – 29% – of all maternal deaths worldwide.
That is an estimated total of 75,000 women dying in childbirth in a year, which works out at one death every seven minutes.
The frustration for many is that a large number of the deaths – from things like bleeding after childbirth (known as postpartum haemorrhage), are preventable.
Chinenye Nweze was 36 when she bled to death at a hospital in the south-eastern town of Onitsha five years ago.
“The doctors needed blood,” her brother Henry Edeh remembers. “The blood they had wasn’t enough and they were running around. Losing my sister and my friend is nothing I would wish on an enemy. The pain is unbearable.”
Among the other common causes of maternal deaths are obstructed labour, high blood pressure and unsafe abortions.
Nigeria’s “very high” maternal mortality rate is the result of a combination of a number of factors, according to Martin Dohlsten from the Nigeria office of the UN’s children’s organisation, Unicef.
