LAGOS, Nigeria(VOICE OF NAIJA)- Nigeria continues to face a severe maternal health crisis, with nearly one in every five maternal deaths worldwide occurring in the country, according to the Centre for Journalism Innovation Development (CJID).
The organization raised the concern during a two-day training for health journalists in Abuja focused on investigative reporting skills for Nigeria’s major health challenges.
The workshop focused on six priority areas, including maternal/child health, primary healthcare, family planning, immunization, nutrition, and infectious diseases.
Speaking at the event, CJID Programme Manager, Felicia Dairo, warned that Nigeria remains one of the world’s deadliest places for childbirth, due to poor healthcare funding and dilapidating primary health facilities.
She described the situation as a “quiet structural emergency” driven by poor accountability and weak transparency in the health sector.
“Nigeria accounts for nearly 20 percent of global maternal deaths, with a maternal mortality ratio that remains terrifyingly high,” she said.
According to Dairo, repeated government promises to improve healthcare have failed to translate into adequate funding.
She noted that Nigeria still falls below the 15 percent health budget target agreed under the Abuja Declaration.
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The programme manager further explained that many Primary Health Care (PHC) centres across the country continue to operate without clean water, steady electricity and essential medicines despite billions of naira reportedly allocated to healthcare services every year.
Dairo accused public institutions of hiding failures in the system through inaccessible budget records, fragmented health data, and bureaucratic delays that make investigations difficult.
“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,” Dairo stated.
She therefore warned that overreliance on official government statements has weakened accountable journalism, allowing major problems in healthcare financing service delivery to continue unchecked.
“It happens because health data in Nigeria is deliberately scattered across bureaucratic silos. It happens because national budget documents are intentionally opaque,” Dairo added.
On that note, she urged journalists to focus more on evidence-based investigations capable of exposing how healthcare funds fail to reach hospitals and community clinics where they are most needed.
“We cannot answer these questions with emotional op-eds. We must answer them with iron-clad, data-driven journalism,” she urged.
Dairo explained that the training programme was created to equip journalists with practical skills for tracking health budgets, analyzing complex datasets, and uncovering gaps in accountability across the healthcare system.
The growing concerns over maternal deaths continue to highlight the urgent need for stronger healthcare financing, improved hospital infrastructure and transparent management of public health resources across Nigeria.
