In 2008, Dr. Laura Stachel visited northern Nigeria on a research trip to study maternal mortality in a state hospital. She found that the conditions in northern Nigeria were challenging to say the least. Women were 70 times more likely to die than in the U.S. from complications due to health problems and lack of adequate supplies and equipment.

One of the most attention-grabbing situations, in the hospital she was visiting, was the lack of reliable lighting due to sporadic electricity. Electricity in the main hospital was available no more than 12 hours a day, and there was no guarantee that it would stay on that long. If a woman was giving birth at night, many times there was little to no light at all to deliver the babies. A cesarean section would have to wait until morning or be performed by flashlight; deliveries were performed . . . (Read Full Article)