This week, as the global community observes the second World Postpartum Haemorrhage Day, we mark one year since the World Health Organization, the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics and the International Confederation of Midwives launched their consolidated guidelines for the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of postpartum haemorrhage at the President’s Session of the FIGO 2025 World Congress in Cape Town, the same gathering at which 5 October was declared a global day of awareness, action and accountability, and where our delegation from the Wellbeing Foundation Africa joined colleagues from across the world in adding our pledge to end postpartum haemorrhage by creating access to equitable care and championing the midwives who stand beside every woman at birth.

The research published this year has lent that moment renewed urgency, with the 2026 Lancet Series on postpartum haemorrhage, launched at the International Confederation of Midwives Triennial Congress in Lisbon, estimating that postpartum haemorrhage affects 27 million women each year and claims nearly 43,000 lives, one woman every twelve minutes, at a cost to countries, health systems and families of more than US$10 billion annually, while finding that visual estimation of blood loss misses around half of all cases and that objective measurement with calibrated drapes, paired with an immediate bundle of uterine massage, an oxytocic drug, tranexamic acid, intravenous fluids and examination for the source of bleeding, can reduce progression to life-threatening haemorrhage by up to 60 per cent.

These findings carry forward a journey the Wellbeing Foundation Africa has travelled for many years. In the era of the Millennium Development Goals, we joined the advocacy alongside the Partnership for Transforming Health Systems Phase II, the UK Department for International Development’s programme to strengthen maternal and child health in Nigeria, to bring non-pneumatic anti-shock garments and calibrated blood collection drapes into Nigerian facilities, so that bleeding could be measured early and women in shock stabilised while awaiting definitive care. As the world turned to the Sustainable Development Goals, we championed the WOMAN trial led by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, which enrolled more than 20,000 women across 21 countries, Nigeria among them, and showed that tranexamic acid given within three hours of bleeding onset reduces deaths from bleeding by nearly a third, and we advocated for heat-stable carbetocin developed by Ferring Pharmaceuticals, a uterotonic that requires no refrigeration or cold chain, which was added to the WHO Model List of Essential Medicines in 2019 and whose first use in Nigeria and sub-Saharan Africa we were honoured to mark.

This evidence is now matched by a practical path to delivery, as the new implementation guide developed by the World Health Organization with FIGO, the International Confederation of Midwives, Jhpiego and UNFPA equips countries to move the guidelines from policy into everyday practice through a structured approach that places leadership, communication and the confidence of frontline teams alongside clinical skill, and it is precisely this translation from evidence to the bedside that the Wellbeing Foundation Africa continues to advance through our programming and our enduring investment in midwives and nurses across Nigeria.

As we look towards 2030, I call upon health ministries, partners and donors to invest at scale in calibrated drapes, quality-assured medicines including tranexamic acid and heat-stable uterotonics, and midwifery training, and to count, audit and account for every woman lost to bleeding after birth, so that the promise of this research reaches every birthing room and no mother dies because help arrived too late.

 

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