This is an IHeart podcast.

I'm Maeve Higgins and this is Solvable.

Interviews with the world's most innovative thinkers working to solve the world's biggest problems.

My name is Navine Rao. I'm the Senior Vice President for Health and Rockefeller Foundation.

And I believe the crisis of maternal mortality is solvable.

This episode we're hearing from Dr. Neveen Rao. you just heard him there. He's from the Rockabala Foundation

and he is a renowned expert in safe pregnancies and healthy deliveries around the world.

Now, if you had to guess, how many babies would you say are born every day? I'll give you a second.

Now, I cheated, I looked it up and UNICEF estimates that an average of,

wait for it, 353,000 babies are born each day around the world. Isn't that incredible? It's more than

four births every second. And most of those, they're safe for both the mother and the baby.

But many of those births are not.

In fact, nearly 830 women die every day due to complications during pregnancy and childbirth.

Now, most of these deaths can be prevented through skilled care at childbirth and just having

access to emergency obstetric care.

But in sub-Saharan Africa, where maternal mortality ratios are the highest, fewer than half

of women are attended to by a trained midwife or a nurse

or a doctor during childbirth. So you can probably guess that maternal deaths mirror the gap

between the rich and the poor. Less than 1% of maternal deaths happen in wealthy countries,

but I wonder if you knew that America has

the highest maternal mortality rate of all industrial countries,

in fact, by several times over.

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