Nigeria accounts for 20% of global maternal deaths, report finds.

By Folarin Kehinde

The Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development (CJID) has highlighted Nigeria’s troubling maternal mortality rate, noting that the country accounts for almost 20 percent of all maternal deaths worldwide. The figure comes amid ongoing underfunding and systemic shortcomings in the health sector.

Felicia Dairo, CJID’s Programme Manager, made the remarks during a two‑day training for health journalists in Abuja, aimed at sharpening investigative skills for reporting on Nigeria’s key health challenges.

Dairo described the situation as a “quiet structural emergency” in the health sector, aggravated by poor accountability, opaque budgeting 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 criticized the government’s repeated commitments that have yet to translate into adequate funding, noting that the health sector still receives less than the 15 percent benchmark set by the Abuja Declaration.

Many primary health care (PHC) facilities across the country, she added, continue to lack basic utilities such as water and electricity, and essential drugs, despite billions of naira being earmarked for healthcare delivery.

Dairo 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 Dairo, this overreliance on official narratives weakens accountability journalism and allows 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 urged journalists to move beyond emotional storytelling and adopt evidence‑based, data‑driven investigations that expose how public funds earmarked 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.

The training aims to equip journalists with the investigative skills needed to track health budgets, analyse complex datasets and uncover accountability gaps across critical health sectors.

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

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