< Previous Map

Births Attended

Map No. 4

Open PDF poster

Next Map >

Worldwide 62% of births are attended by skilled health personnel. This ranges from 6% in Ethiopia, to practically 100% birth attendance in Japan.

The total number of births attended, shown on the map, depends partly on how many women there are and how many babies they have.

In the graph below, the 'percentage attended' indicates the proportion of total births attended in each region. For instance, if you were recently born in the Cambodia, there is twice the chance your birth would have been attended, than if you were born in Chad.

"...how many of us realize that, in much of the world, the act of giving life to a child is still the biggest killer of women of child-bearing age?" Liya Kibede, 2005

This map shows the worldwide distribution of all attended births.

• Open PDF poster, designed for printing. You need Acrobat Reader.
• View labelled territory map or population map for comparison
• Interactive (SVG) version of the map
• 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