In a world that celebrates technological marvels and medical breakthroughs, West Africa continues to struggle with a deeply concerning yet largely preventable challenge: the persistently high rate of maternal mortality. In 2025, a woman in rural West Africa is still more likely to die giving birth than to graduate from secondary school. This is not just a health crisis. It is a moral indictment of leadership, policy inertia, and society’s quiet tolerance of gendered suffering.
The region’s governments may occasionally boast about reform or roll out glossy health strategies, but the numbers tell a far grimmer story. In remote towns and forgotten villages, women are haemorrhaging to death during childbirth because blood banks are empty. They are dying from eclampsia because magnesium sulphate is unavailable. They are enduring fatal complications because there are no midwives in sight: only well-meaning but untrained traditional birth attendants. These are not acts of God; they are failures of governance.
We must confront a hard truth: maternal mortality in West Africa is not inevitable; it is the predictable outcome of decades of political neglect, underinvestment, and systemic inequality. And unless we disrupt the status quo with unapologetic innovation and radical policy reform, women will keep dying in the shadows of our development speeches.
Innovation isn’t a luxury. It’s the lifeline
Let’s be clear: innovation is no longer optional. It is the oxygen mask in this suffocating crisis. Across Nigeria, Ghana, and Senegal, digital health platforms are now reaching expectant mothers with life-saving information about prenatal care, nutrition, and danger signs. Telemedicine is helping bridge the chasm between urban hospitals and rural health deserts, offering consultations that would have otherwise required treacherous journeys or simply never happened.
Cutting-edge diagnostic tools, like AI-powered ultrasound devices, are shifting the odds. Mobile blood delivery services like Nigeria’s LifeBank are no longer just “nice-to-have”; they are preventing unnecessary deaths due to postpartum hemorrhage, the region’s silent killer of new mothers.
These are not pilot projects for donor reports. These are lifelines and yet, they remain woefully underfunded and poorly scaled.
Policy: Where is the political will?
For every successful digital solution, there is a bureaucratic bottleneck choking its spread. Maternal health will not be revolutionised by apps alone. We need bold policy reform. That means free maternal healthcare that’s actually free, not riddled with informal fees or ghost workers. It means expanding the budget for rural health infrastructure and putting an end to the political theatre of underfunded primary health centres that lack electricity, let alone a functional delivery room.
Ghana’s Free Maternal Health Policy and Nigeria’s MNCH initiative show glimmers of progress but are not yet systemic game-changers. Where they exist, they often rely on donor goodwill rather than institutional backbone. The Basic Health Care Provision Fund (BHCPF) in Nigeria is a good idea on paper, but without transparency, oversight, and accountability, it risks becoming another cash pit in the health sector’s long line of broken promises.
We must ask ourselves: if we can mobilise billions for elections and security votes, why can’t we guarantee blood, drugs, and skilled birth attendants for our mothers?
The cost of apathy
Too many West African women die invisible deaths, quietly buried in village graveyards, their stories untold, their dreams erased. The human cost is incalculable. But the economic cost is easier to measure: maternal mortality undermines productivity, devastates families, and perpetuates cycles of poverty. Every mother we lose is a blow to national development.
And yet, the status quo remains largely unchallenged. Why? Because those in power, mostly men, rarely experience the terror of childbirth without skilled care. They fly their wives to London or Johannesburg for delivery. Meanwhile, the average woman in Kebbi or Kolda must deliver her baby in the back of a tricycle or, worse, in a candle-lit room with no trained personnel.
This is the apartheid of maternal care: a divide not only between rich and poor, urban and rural, but between the valued and the forgotten.
Hope on the horizon: But will we act?
Events like WHX Lagos 2025 offer a rare and powerful convergence of health innovators, policymakers, investors, and civil society. But let’s not reduce them to talking shops. These are the moments where we must demand more than polite panel discussions. We must commit to concrete, measurable outcomes: new funding streams, scaled technologies, and legally enforceable maternal health policies.
WHX Labs and similar platforms can catalyse the revolution we desperately need: if we stop tiptoeing around the crisis and start treating maternal mortality for what it is: a national emergency. This is the time for tech innovators, lab scientists, community health workers, and government officials to form unlikely alliances, bound by one common goal, to stop burying our mothers.
Conclusion: No more excuses
Reducing maternal mortality is not rocket science. The solutions already exist. The technology is in our hands. The data is clear. What’s missing is courage: the political courage to prioritise the health of women over elite comfort and the moral courage to treat every maternal death as a national failure.
West Africa cannot claim to be rising while its women are dying in childbirth. If leadership continues to falter, then civil society must rise: louder, stronger, and more organised than ever before. Because no woman should die giving life, and no society that allows this should sleep easy.
Tom Coleman, director of WHX Lagos and WHX Lab, Lagos.
