A Health Status Update on Women in African Countries: Current Statistics, Critical Dilemmas, and Key Correlations

To understand what is taking place with women’s health in Africa, this paper looks at a number of key variables: population, age structure, median age, mother’s mean age with their firstborn, maternal mortality, infant mortality, life expectancy, fertility rate, contraceptive rate, current health, physician density, hospital bed density, HIV rates for women, obesity rates for women, and the percentage of underweight children per country. These key health variables play an important role in deciphering women’s health and are analyzed using World Factbook data from 55 African countries from five African subregions: Northern Africa, West Africa, East Africa, Central Africa, and Southern Africa. The World Factbook provides basic intelligence data on the history, people, government, economy, energy, geography, environment, communications, transportation, military, terrorism, and transnational issues for 266 world entities and countries.