(26 Aug 2025)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Konduga, Nigeria – 22 July 2025
1. Various of women walking on the street
2. SOUNDBITE (Hausa) Aisha Muhammed, mother of twins:
++PARTIALLY OVERLAID BY SHOTS 3 AND 4++
"A lack of good hospitals is our problem, as well as a lack of workers, medication and doctors that can treat us. A lack of access to the road from Konduga to Maiduguri in the night time to visit to the hospital (is also a problem).
3. Various of women walking on the street
4. Various of woman at an International Rescue Committee (IRC) clinic
5. SOUNDBITE (English) Dr. Fanya Fwachabe, IRC Sexual and Reproductive Health Manager:
++PARTIALLY OVERLAID BY SHOTS 6, 7, 8 AND 9 ++
"The reproductive health needs for women and girls is very critical when you come to the northeast, and specifically in the deep field locations, that’s where there are partial accessibility or mostly inaccessible. So, people in these areas find it difficult to have access to service because the services are either difficult to reach them or even where the services are available, maybe because it’s a garrison town, where it is trenched by the military."
6. Mid of Aisha at home cooking
7. Mid of women at Konduga village
8. Various of Konduga General Hospital
9. Various of Falmata Muhammed heading home from the IRC clinic
STORYLINE:
Life is already tough for pregnant women anywhere in Nigeria, where one in every 100 women dies giving birth, and at least 75,000 annually, the highest in the world according to the World Health Organization.
Aisha Muhammed was in the third trimester of her pregnancy when she had the convulsions and high blood pressure of eclampsia, a leading cause of maternal death.
Her village’s only health clinic had no doctor, and the only medical help was 40 kilometers (25 miles) away in one of the world’s most dangerous places.
More women die giving birth in Nigeria than anywhere else in the world, according to the World Health Organization. But Muhammed managed to reach the city of Maiduguri and have a cesarean section the next day, delivering twins in April.
The odds are stacked against pregnant women in Nigeria’s northeast like never before.
The deadly Boko Haram militant group is making a resurgence. And hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid from the United States, once Nigeria’s biggest donor, have disappeared under the Trump administration this year.
Roads are closed by fighting. Many doctors and other health workers, as well as aid organizations, have fled. In an attempt to make up for the lack of U.S. funding, Nigeria has released an emergency $200 million for its health budget.
Even before these developments, Nigeria had over a quarter of the world’s maternal deaths in 2023 — 75,000 — according to the WHO.
At least one in every 100 women dies giving birth in Africa’s most populous country, which faces chronic underfunding for health systems that cater to 220 million people.
The Associated Press visited Borno state, one of the areas most threatened by the Boko Haram insurgency. Its militants have fought a 14-year conflict seeking to impose Islamic law and are best known for its mass kidnappings of schoolchildren.
Now, despite the efforts of Nigeria’s military, Boko Haram has been carrying out more assaults, attacking almost daily in the region.
Health workers say it is increasingly difficult to recruit doctors and others, especially outside of the relatively safe state capital, Maiduguri.
Doctors in Borno can expect to make about $99 to $156 a month.
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