Maternal Mortality

How should you read Maternal Mortality data?

Disease-burden figures are modelled estimates, not simple death counts, and that distinction matters when you read them. They draw on vital registration, hospital records, surveys, and statistical modelling to fill gaps where direct reporting is weak, so the precision implied by a decimal point is wider than it looks, especially for countries with limited health-information systems. Rates are usually age-standardised to allow fair comparison between younger and older populations, which can move a country's apparent ranking up or down relative to a crude count. Because definitions and methods are periodically revised, two figures from different release years are not always directly comparable. Read these numbers as the best available signal of relative burden, useful for spotting patterns rather than for pinpoint accuracy.

Maternal Mortality falls within the communicable disease category in the WHO Global Burden of Disease classification. Maternal mortality ratio (deaths per 100,000 live births) This 2023 ranking has 194 country observations, with values reported per 100K live births to support like-for-like comparison within that year. The unweighted mean across all country observations is 117; it is a reference point, not a population-weighted global rate.

The highest recorded Maternal Mortality ratio in the 2023 comparison is in Nigeria at 993 per 100K live births. That is 21.3x the cohort median of 47 per 100K live births across 194 eligible countries. At the other end of the same comparison, Belarus records 1 per 100K live births. The spread describes differences in the published estimates; it does not by itself establish why they differ or diagnose conditions in any country. The top 50 countries above show the highest values in this dataset, while the lowest values are shown alongside where applicable to make the full range visible.

Click any country name to open its full profile on PlainCountries, which combines this disease rate with population, GDP per capita, life expectancy, healthcare spending, and dozens of other indicators. Reading disease mortality together with economic and social context is more informative than either number in isolation. All disease figures on this page are sourced from the WHO Global Health Observatory under a CC BY 4.0 licence and are identified by WHO indicator code MDG_0000000026. Rates are age-standardised where WHO provides the adjusted series, which removes the effect of differences in population age structure between countries.