3,000 midwives lost every year: GRNMA sounds the alarm as maternal care crisis deepens
Ghana is losing the fight to keep its midwives at home, and the consequences for mothers and newborns — particularly those in rural communities — are becoming impossible to ignore.
That was the sobering message at the heart of a symposium held in Kumasi to mark the International Day of the Midwife, an event convened under the rallying cry of the global theme “One Million, More Midwives.”
The gathering brought together a cross-section of voices — policymakers, development partners, health professionals and student midwives — all united around an urgent question: how does Ghana reverse a crisis that is quietly claiming lives?
The numbers paint a stark picture. An estimated 3,000 nurses and midwives walk away from Ghana each year, lured by better wages and working conditions in other countries.
The exodus feeds into a worldwide shortage so severe that the World Health Organisation has determined nearly one million additional midwives are needed globally to make safe childbirth a reality for every woman.
Philimon Adu Brempong, Ashanti Regional First Vice Chairman of the Ghana Registered Nurses and Midwives Association, told the gathering that patching the gap with fresh graduates alone will not suffice.
What Ghana needs, he argued, is a well-thought-out national strategy that confronts the full complexity of the problem — from where midwives are deployed to how they are treated once they are in post.
The concentration of skilled midwives in urban centres while rural communities go without was a particular concern he raised. “The disparity between the number of pregnant women and available midwives is significant.
Many midwives are also posted to cities, while underserved and rural communities face shortages. For this reason, scaling up midwifery training is essential to close the gap,” he said.
Beyond recruitment and distribution, he pressed for meaningful improvements in working conditions, structured career development, clear pathways for professional advancement and concrete steps to tackle the burnout that drives many experienced midwives out of the system entirely.
Professor Veronica Millicent Dzomeku, Dean of the Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, delivered the symposium’s keynote address, anchoring the conversation in a set of statistics that underscored just how high the stakes are.
She cited WHO findings showing that a woman dies from pregnancy or childbirth complications somewhere in the world roughly every two minutes — a death toll she described as tragic precisely because so much of it is avoidable.
Her own research suggests that properly supported midwifery care could prevent 67 percent of maternal deaths, 64 percent of newborn deaths and 65 percent of stillbirths, with the potential to save up to 4.3 million lives annually by 2035.
“Midwives not only bring life into the world, but they also help life begin safely with dignity and hope. Midwives protect the future,” she declared, framing investment in the profession not as a health expenditure but as one of the smartest and most cost-effective decisions any government could make.
Her blueprint for reform centred on rebuilding midwifery education from the inside out — more teaching faculty, better simulation facilities, curricula grounded in current evidence, stronger mentorship structures and uninterrupted access to professional development.
She directed her appeal squarely at those with the power to act. “Government, the private sector and NGOs must hear the cry of midwives, mothers and communities, and act on the evidence,” she urged.
Gertrude Adomako Mensah, Regional Coordinator of the Midwives Society, closed the conversation with a direct message for pregnant women across the region: show up for your antenatal care appointments and keep coming back.
She also challenged practising midwives to go beyond clinical duties, deepening their connections with expectant mothers through counselling and community engagement as a means of driving down preventable deaths at the point of delivery.
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