The United Nations says thanks improved access to affordable, quality health services, the number of pregnant women or new mothers and young children who die each year has reduced.
In a statement on Thursday, Chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus of the World Health Organization said “In countries that provide everyone with safe, affordable, high-quality health services, women and babies survive and thrive.”
Since the turn of the century, the number of deaths among children under the age of five has been cut almost in half to some 5.3 million worldwide last year.

Lamenting the increasing rate of maternal mortality in the country, Minister of Health, Prof. Isaac Adewole, has described pregnancy and child birthing greatest occupational hazard in Nigeria.
 
Addressing journalists in Ibadan at a strategy meeting organised by the Network of Reproductive Health Journalists in Nigeria (NRHJN), Adewole said that a nation must attach priority to women and children, adding that 30 percent of Nigeria’s Maternal Mortality Rate (MMR) can be prevented by Family Planning (FP).
 

Worried by increase in number of women coming down with fistula health condition in the country, gynaecologists have called for abolition of traditional birth attendance.
 
Rather, pregnant women are urged to attend antenatal care in primary healthcare and other recognised hospitals, as this would help to reduce cases of prolonged obstructed labours, which are the major cause of obstetric fistula.
 

It was a Tuesday morning. Passengers waited at the creek to be ferried across by the rickety canoe to the other side of Agboyi, a community of about 30,000 dwellers. It has existed for over 500 years, but remains undeveloped.