This is a very good question.
Preventable maternal death is a driving force behind our comprehensive approach to SRHR. Women are dying unnecessarily because they can't get access to basic, essential health services.
The member has properly provided us with the level of severity of this incident, with seven million ending up in hospital and requiring hospitalized care for unsafe abortions. We have estimates of somewhere above 40,000 women dying annually because of unsafe abortion, and the actual figure is likely much higher, according to our partners. This is something that is certainly under-reported.
To be clear, the case fatality for these situations is much higher in sub-Saharan Africa than in other regions of the world. It's more than twice as high as the case fatality in Asia, three or four times higher. This is a problem that is particularly affecting women in sub-Saharan Africa.
The member asked what the drivers of this are. They are primarily a lack of access to effective reproductive health services, including safe and legal abortion services and postabortion care at a significant scale to meet the need. We are working with partners like Ipas and others to try to strengthen the capacity of national health systems to address these situations. I can note that this is something that ministers of health across sub-Saharan Africa and, in particular, in western Africa have underlined to me as among the highest priority areas that they are seeking reinforced support for.
I mentioned the Global Financing Facility before. The Global Financing Facility provides on-budget support to ministries of health in sub-Saharan Africa to help them develop and implement comprehensive approaches to SRHR that would include improved services for women. That's an important part of what we support.
The most vulnerable women, of course, are those who are marginalized, from diverse communities and, in particular, those outside of major urban settings, where they don't have access to adequate reproductive health services. This has been an important area of focus for us and will continue to be as we try to increase our investments, specifically for these areas of comprehensive SRHR that have traditionally been neglected by international donors.
There are—