The vast majority of maternal deaths – more than 99 per cent, according to the 2005 UN inter-agency estimates – occurred in developing countries. Half of these (265,000) took place in sub-Saharan Africa and another third (187,000) in South Asia. Between them, these two regions accounted for 85 per cent of the world’s pregnancy-related deaths in 2005. India alone had 22 per cent of the global total.

However, between 1990 and 2005 both the absolute numbers of maternal deaths and maternal mortality ratios declined in all of the developing regions outside sub-Saharan Africa.

Source: World Health Organization, United Nations Children’s Fund, United Nations Population Fund and the World Bank, Maternal Mortality in 2005: Estimates developed by WHO, UNICEF, UNFPA and the World Bank, WHO, Geneva, 2007, p. 35.