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Midwives Working

Map No. 215

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Midwives assist births. India is the territory with the most midwives working there, estimated to be almost half a million. The Philippines has the second highest number of midwives living and working there. Many territories in South and North America have a small number of midwives.

The number of midwives per person is highest in two sets of islands: Ireland and the Seychelles. It is lowest in Togo and Burundi.

Some territories have few midwives because they have not (and sometimes cannot) adopted this custom, others prefer births to be attended by doctors. The value of midwives has only recently been realised in North America.

"The lives and health of many millions more would be saved with greater investments in midwives." Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, 2006

Territory size shows the proportion of all midwives that work in that territory.

• Open PDF poster, designed for printing. You need Acrobat Reader.
• View labelled territory map or population map for comparison
• Data files: Excel (large with map), Excel (small no map), Opendoc format (see notes)
• Technical notes for this data.
• High Resolution image (see copyright conditions)
• All of the data we use is estimated; see data page