Nigeria accounts for 20% of global maternal deaths — Report

By Folarin Kehinde

The Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development (CJID) has raised concern over Nigeria’s alarming maternal mortality rate, disclosing that the country accounts for nearly 20 per cent of global maternal deaths amid persistent underfunding and systemic failures in the health sector.

Programme Manager of CJID, Felicia Dairo, stated this while speaking at a two-day training for health journalists on investigative skills for reporting Nigeria’s priority health challenges in Abuja.

According to Dairo, Nigeria is facing what she described as a quiet structural emergency in the health sector, worsened by poor accountability, opaque budgeting processes and weak investigative reporting.

“Nigeria accounts for nearly 20 per cent of global maternal deaths, with a maternal mortality ratio that remains terrifyingly high,” she said.

She lamented that despite repeated commitments by government, the health sector continues to receive funding below the 15 per cent benchmark agreed under the Abuja Declaration.

Dairo noted that many Primary Health Care, PHC, facilities across the country still lack functional water supply, electricity and essential drugs even when billions of naira are reportedly allocated to healthcare delivery.

She accused public institutions of shielding systemic failures from scrutiny through fragmented health data, bureaucratic bottlenecks and inaccessible budget documents.

“Every day, our headlines chronicle individual tragedies — a mother who bled to death during childbirth in a rural clinic or a community ravaged by a preventable cholera outbreak — yet most times we rely on official government press releases that claim everything is under control,” she said.

According to her, the overdependence on official narratives has weakened accountability journalism and allowed critical failures in healthcare financing and service delivery to persist unchecked.

“It happens because health data in Nigeria is deliberately scattered across bureaucratic silos. It happens because national budget documents are intentionally opaque,” Dairo stated.

She stressed that journalists must move beyond emotional storytelling and embrace evidence-based, data-driven investigations capable of exposing how public funds meant for healthcare disappear before reaching communities.

“We cannot answer these questions with emotional op-eds. We must answer them with iron-clad, data-driven journalism,” she added.

Meanwhile, Dairo explained that the training was designed to equip journalists with investigative skills needed to track health budgets, analyse complex datasets and uncover accountability gaps across critical health sectors.

The workshop, she said, focuses on six major areas, including primary health care, maternal and child health, family planning, immunisation, nutrition and infectious diseases.

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