Tanzania: About 9,000 Tanzanian women die every year as they deliver babies due to malnutrition and lack of access to healthcare, according to the United Nations.
Sixty per cent of all Tanzanian mothers deliver at home, many without the help of a skilled birth attendant, which puts both the lives of the mother and the child at risk, experts say.
"Nine thousand women die every year while giving birth or through complications during birth," Rodney Phillips, UN Children's Fund representative in Tanzania, said yesterday. "There are 529 deaths in every 100,000 live births."
In the impoverished country of 35 million where more than 50 per cent of the population lives on less than a dollar a day, the average woman bears six children.
UNICEF said Tanzania lacked a functioning social welfare programme, a hospital referral system or working antenatal care clinics. Expectant mothers, mostly living in rural areas, are expected to continue performing manual labour. They do not get quality food or rest despite being physically exhausted.
"Here you have the case of a woman, she is malnourished, she is fatigued from work, she goes only once to an antenatal clinic," Mr Phillips said.
"The health worker is unable to identify a complicated pregnancy, there is no referral system. It's a formula for disaster. It's a complex mix of factors that end up with a dead mother. Now add to that the underlying HIV situation and with no immune system functioning, honestly, that's it."
According to the UN statistics, between 12 and 15 per cent of adults are infected with HIV in Tanzania. One of the UN Millennium Development Goals is to improve maternal health and to reduce the maternal mortality ratio by three-quarters by 2015.
Unicef estimates that Tanzania has up to 2.5 million orphans, half of whom have lost one or both parents to Aids.