I have had gestational diabetes in all three of my pregnancies.
My first ended with the loss of my baby, a loss doctors called “inevitable.”
My gestational diabetes was not caught early enough to manage its effects, and I believe that is what lay behind that word.
When I was finally diagnosed in my second pregnancy in Ghana, I was told the condition would vanish after birth.
I was told to cut down on “sugar” and given metformin.
No one asked what “sugar” meant to me: the cubes in my tea, or the kenkey, banku and rice on my plate.
No one warned me what it meant for my baby or my future health.
I grasped its full weight only when I was diagnosed again in the United States.
As Ghana joins the world to mark World Diabetes Day on November 14, 2026, I want to make one plea: that we tell our mothers the whole story, in words and ways that make sense to them.
Quiet, growing problem
Gestational diabetes is rising in Ghana. Studies found it in 0.5 per cent of pregnant women in 2004 and 9.3 per cent in 2015, and a 2022 Kumasi study found 8.5 per cent. At Korle Bu Teaching Hospital, recorded cases more than doubled from 123 in 2020 to 293 in 2024.
Yet many clinics still screen with urine dipsticks, which miss many women who develop the condition later in pregnancy, and do not account for the many women who do not even seek antenatal care when pregnant.
Ghana’s 2023 World Health Organisation STEPwise approach to Noncommunicable Disease risk factor Surveillance (WHO STEPS) survey found raised fasting blood glucose in 5.2 per cent of adults.
The International Diabetes Federation (IDF) projects that adults living with diabetes will rise from about 317,000 in 2024 to over 800,000 by 2050.
What it costs babies, us
When a mother’s blood sugar runs high, so does her baby’s.
Babies can grow too large, making birth harder and raising the risk of caesarean section and shoulder injury during delivery.
After birth, many face dangerously low blood sugar, breathing difficulty and jaundice.
Left undetected, it can cost a baby’s life. A UK study found women with raised blood sugar who were never diagnosed had four times the risk of late stillbirth; those who were diagnosed and cared for had no such increase.
At Korle Bu, a study of women with diabetes in pregnancy, mostly gestational, recorded stillbirths, newborn low blood sugar and newborn deaths.
The harm outlasts delivery.
Children exposed in the womb face higher risks of obesity and type 2 diabetes as teenagers and young adults, and mothers face higher lifetime risks of type 2 diabetes and heart disease.
For type 2 diabetes, a mother’s risk is nearly ten times higher.
These risks can be lowered. In a United States Diabetes Prevention Programme, women with past gestational diabetes who followed an intensive programme of healthier eating, regular exercise and weight loss cut their progression to type 2 diabetes by 53 per cent.
In a study of over 4,000 women with past gestational diabetes, those who kept five healthy habits (healthy weight, good diet, regular exercise, moderate alcohol and no smoking) had more than 90 per cent lower risk.
In Ghanaian homes, that can mean a brisk daily walk to market or church, smaller balls of banku and fufu with more kontomire and garden eggs, water instead of malt and soft drinks, and a blood sugar check after delivery and every year after.
Let's tell whole story,our way
Our nurses, midwives and obstetricians already hold what mothers need: medical expertise and cultural knowledge.
Ghanaian researchers recommend early screening and involving women and their families in culturally appropriate care during and after pregnancy.
In practice, that means: asking what she already knows before explaining; naming the foods on her plate, not just “sugar”; teaching in Twi, Ewe, Ga, Dagbani and other languages, with pictures and voice notes she can replay; bringing husbands, mothers and mothers-in-law into the conversation, as these people determine what is cooked in the home; following her after delivery and noting the diagnosis in her child’s health record; and carrying the message through churches, mosques, market associations and radio so none is left out.
I am not asking Ghana to copy American care. I am asking that no woman leaves a clinic with only a prescription and a vague warning about sugar.
This World Diabetes Day, let us give our mothers the whole truth, in a language they understand.
The writer is a health communicator/Project ECHO-certified Hepatitis and Harm Reduction Specialist/PhD student in Transborder and Global Human Dynamics at New Mexico State University. E-mail:
