The UN has warned that half a million women will continue to die each year in pregnancy or childbirth unless the world's poorest countries give higher priority to women's reproductive health.
One of the aims of the UN's Millennium Development Goals was to cut the deaths by three quarters by 2015.
The Director of the UNDP's Human Development Report Office, Kevin Watkins, said that most of the countries which account for the bulk of maternal deaths have made no progress at all towards reaching the millenium development goal, and some are going backwards.
