What Would Iyefu Do?

In 2012, Iyefu published an article in Iye! her magazine titled "Countdown to 2015: Nigeria, Still Lagging Behind in Improved Maternal Health". The statistics were pretty grim. The maternal mortality rate is among the highest in the world and, about one million children die each year

before their fifth birthday were sentences that screamed at you. It didn't get any better. ...the lifetime risk of a woman dying during pregnancy in Nigeria has been estimated to be 1 in 8, [...] compared to only 1 in 4,500 in Sweden. The article discussed the common complications from childbirth, its preponderance in the NorthEast and the NorthWest regions of Nigeria directly related to the lack of prenatal and post-natal healthcare. The line between poverty and maternal morbidity could not be starker. It is no coincidence that some of Nigeria's most impoverished regions experience the highest infant and maternal mortality rates. It was this realization that galvanized Iyefu to do something. Along with her church's help and assistance from the Nigerian diaspora, she put together an event in Iga Okpaya, the village in Idomaland where we are from. There, pregnant women were examined, prenatal health guidelines provided, and drugs distributed. It took some doing. Navigating the capricious Nigerian Customs and Excise regulations (or whatever the border agents chose to make regulations) was no mean feat. It is a testament to Iyefu's quiet determination that the event was held at all. But it was personal. We had a cousin who was part of that grim statistic of maternal mortality. If the right education prevented just one death; by bringing to someone's attention a potential pre-eclampsia candidate, then it was absolutely worth doing. It was quite simply what Iyefu would do.