Maternal mortality in countries facing important gender issues: Case study of Burkina Faso

This paper considered maternal mortality as a human right concern and specifically a gender issue. The relationship between maternal mortality and gender issues is not obvious. However, most of women problems in some countries could have their roots in the important level of discrimination based gender. In this paper, we believe that inequalities and inequities based gender issues on education, employment, health, etc, increase considerably the risk of women death during pregnancy, delivery and post-partum period. Maternal mortality and discrimination base gender are two important women matters in Burkina Faso. But, the relationship between them is neglected by researchers as well as policy makers and deciders. The aim of this paper is to examine the relationship between gender issues and maternal mortality. Findings show a real and important influence of discrimination base gender in the domain of education, age at marriage, economic activities and empowerment on maternal mortality.