Maternal Mortality and the Role of Quality Education

Abstract

Today, the issue of high maternal mortality is a topical problem in developing countries, in particular, Nigeria. The African Population and Health Research Centre put the incidence of maternal mortality in Nigeria at approximately 40,000 annually, accounting for roughly 20 per cent of the global maternal mortality. With the present situation of a high maternal mortality rate amidst different initiative or programme interventions in Nigeria, how vital is the role of quality education? The leading objective of this research is to pursue to a logical conclusion the policy feasibility of improved quality education towards maternal mortality reduction in Nigeria. Adopting the Autoregressive Distributed Lag method of estimation, the study, among others, suggested enormous evidence of a percentage increment in quality education leading to a maternal mortality rate reduction of up to 0.31 per cent in the short run and 1.45 per cent in the long run per annum.