Kenya is losing fifteen mothers a day — and the numbers are getting worse
Maternal health
Skilled birth attendance has fallen sharply, family planning uptake is declining, and nearly half of all maternal deaths happen inside health facilities that fail to deliver timely care
By Grace Wanja
Kenya’s rate of skilled birth attendance fell from 69.77 per cent to 65.47 per cent between mid-2025 and early 2026, as fresh data presented to editors in Nairobi yesterday revealed deepening gaps in maternal and newborn healthcare that are costing lives at a rate the country’s own health targets cannot afford to ignore.
The figures, shared at the Wanahabari Editors’ Roundtable on Strengthening Media Engagement for Maternal, Newborn, Child Health and Nutrition, paint a picture of a health system under strain at precisely the moments that matter most — pregnancy, delivery and the fragile hours that follow. Over the same period, the number of women using family planning services dropped from 1,519,066 to 1,385,575, a decline that health experts say is not a footnote but a warning.
Polycarp Oyoo, Programmes Adviser for Maternal and Newborn Health at the International Centre for Reproductive Health Kenya, put the human cost in terms that statistics alone cannot fully carry. “Every day we lose about 15 mothers,” he told the gathering, adding that dozens of newborn deaths and stillbirths are recorded daily across the country. Behind each of those numbers is a family, a community and, in too many cases, a death that need not have happened.
The data draws a sharp and troubling map of where the system is failing. Thirty per cent of maternal and newborn deaths are linked to delays in deciding to seek care — a figure shaped by distance, cost, cultural barriers and a lack of confidence in the health system. A further 25 per cent are tied to delays in physically reaching a health facility. But the statistic that demands the most urgent institutional response is the remaining 45 per cent: mothers and newborns who reach a health facility and still do not receive timely, quality care.
Arriving at a hospital should not be the end of the danger. For too many Kenyan women, it is where the danger continues.
Ministry of Health data cited at the meeting reinforces that finding. Only 37 per cent of facilities offering delivery services meet basic Emergency Obstetric and Newborn Care standards — meaning that nearly two in every three delivery facilities in Kenya falls below the minimum threshold for safe childbirth. Medicine shortages compound the problem at every turn. Nearly half of all facilities report a lack of magnesium sulphate, used to prevent seizures in pre-eclampsia. Forty-seven per cent are without benzyl penicillin. Forty per cent face oxytocin stockouts — the very drug used to prevent and treat postpartum haemorrhage, which was identified as the leading reported maternal complication across the five years to 2025.
In six months alone, Kenya recorded 480 maternal deaths, 811 neonatal deaths and 3,590 perinatal deaths, based on figures drawn from the Ministry of Health’s health information systems. Nakuru, Kakamega and Nairobi were among the counties registering the highest numbers in the review period, though Oyoo was careful to note that counties reporting few or no deaths also warrant scrutiny — low figures can reflect genuine progress or gaps in reporting, and the difference matters enormously for policy.
The decline in family planning uptake adds a longer-term dimension to the crisis. Maternal health, Oyoo argued, does not begin at the delivery room. It begins with access to family planning services that allow women to make informed decisions about when and whether to become pregnant. Among the groups recording the sharpest drops in uptake are adolescents and young women — a pattern that raises questions about access to contraceptives, the quality of information available to younger women and the structural barriers that continue to push reproductive health services beyond their reach.
“Why are adolescents, why is the younger population not getting this?” Oyoo asked — a question that has no comfortable answer, and one that he challenged both journalists and policymakers to investigate rather than assume away.
The roundtable was held against the backdrop of Kenya’s Every Woman Every Newborn Everywhere Acceleration Plan 2026-2028, launched by the government in May. The plan sets targets that are ambitious to the point of being confrontational with the current data: reducing the maternal mortality ratio from 355 deaths per 100,000 live births to 140 or fewer by 2028, cutting neonatal mortality from 21 to 12 or fewer deaths per 1,000 live births, pushing skilled birth attendance to 100 per cent and eliminating oxytocin stockouts entirely. A six-month Maternal and Newborn Health Rapid Results Initiative has been introduced under the plan to drive faster implementation at county level.
Whether those targets will be met is precisely the question that health experts, civil society organisations and — increasingly — editors and journalists are being asked to help answer. Irene Choge of Wanahabari urged newsrooms to move beyond the national aggregate and investigate the causes of individual deaths, the stories of the families left behind and the accountability gaps at facility and county level that allow preventable deaths to accumulate without consequence.
Kenya Editors Guild Chief Executive Linda Bach echoed that call, arguing that health reporting must go beyond statistics to ask harder questions: Which counties are failing to spend their health budgets? Which facilities are chronically understaffed? Which supply chains are breaking down and who is responsible for fixing them?
Oyoo pointed journalists toward the Ministry of Health’s EWENE dashboard as a tool for tracking deaths at county and facility level — a resource that, used consistently, could shift the terms of public debate from national figures toward the specific, locatable, accountable failures that lie beneath them.
Kenya has a plan. It has targets. It has a dashboard. What it needs now is the political will at every level of the health system — national, county and facility — to treat fifteen mothers a day not as a statistic to be managed, but as a crisis to be ended.
The data knows where the failures are. The question is whether those with the power to act are willing to follow it there.
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