FOR EVERY WOMAN
AND GIRL

At age 18, Fátima received her first contraceptive implant. Mother to a 5-month-old boy, Fátima had been living in a displacement camp for three years when she first learned  about family planning from UNFPA staff. After the conversation, Fátima made the decision to receive a contraceptive implant so she could  go back to school and build the life that she wanted for herself and her child. Visibly nervous and apprehensive the day of, the anxiety melted from Fátima the moment the short procedure was finished and she realized she would be protected against pregnancy for the next two years. Afterward, Fátima became more confident in her decision and promised to raise awareness about family planning with her peers.

In northern Peru, access to sexual and reproductive health services for women became a matter of life or death following deadly Cyclone Yaku. The storm destroyed health care centers and family planning became a vital way to combat maternal mortality. UNFPA provided this lifesaving service by sending emergency reproductive health supplies to 33 care facilities in affected areas, launching mobile teams to reach women and girls cut off from services by the cyclone, and even having obstetricians go door to door to provide information about sexual and reproductive health services. In all, these efforts reached 16,400 teenage girls and women with family planning services, empowering them to take charge of their own futures and bodies.

When Monica was 6 months pregnant, Cyclone Ana hit her district, destroying her home and livelihood. Her family stayed at a crowded temporary camp for three months before they made the difficult decision to abandon the land that they had owned for generations — they knew that next time a cyclone came, they may not be lucky enough to escape with their lives.

Unintended pregnancy was the last thing Monica wanted to think about. So, after delivering her baby at a UNFPA-supported clinic, Monica made the decision to use contraceptives to prevent an accidental pregnancy. The contraceptives, supplied by UNFPA, have given Monica and her family a chance to create stability and build a new life for themselves.

At 16 years old, Sia experienced a severe birth complication after being in painful labor for five days straight. On the fifth day, she was taken to a hospital and given an emergency cesarean section, but it was too late — Sia had lost her baby and she developed an obstetric fistula.

Obstetric fistula occurs when prolonged labor results in a tear or hole and leaves women leaking urine or feces. This birth injury has been eliminated in most of the world thanks to timely health interventions. But those who continue to experience obstetric fistula are among the most vulnerable women and girls in the world. 90% of obstetric fistula cases, including Sia’s, result in a stillbirth.

Sia recounts being mocked by society — even the students she taught had complained of the urine that the condition had caused her to leak. She was ashamed and embarrassed.

But that all changed on September 14, 2023, when she and 31 other survivors of obstetric fistula received free surgeries to repair their injuries at a UNFPA women’s center. Sia has now made a full recovery.

When Cyclone Mocha made landfall in Myanmar in May 2023, an estimated 3.4 million people were impacted. The vicious storm tore homes to pieces, flooded villages, and destroyed many roads and bridges. Pregnant women like 26-year-old Nway Nway were stranded without access to vital reproductive health services.

Fortunately, UNFPA sprang into action. In the areas that had become inaccessible, UNFPA mobile clinics were able to provide critical prenatal and postpartum care to Nway Nway and the 20,700 other pregnant women who were affected by the cyclone.

Faili knew that her fourth birth would not be typical. Early in her pregnancy, she had attended a UNFPA health facility at Nyarugusu refugee camp in Tanzania. There, UNFPA staff recommended that she deliver her baby via cesarean section due to the baby’s large size. When it was time to deliver,  a worker trained in emergency obstetric care and infection prevention delivered the baby. The fear that Faili had felt before giving birth dissipated as soon as she saw that her baby was okay. Faili was one of the 6,235 women and girls to give birth at Nyarugusu during the year – and incredibly, not a single woman died in the refugee camp.

After eight years of conflict in Yemen, mothers like Zahra are still going without food so their children can eat. When Zahra became pregnant with her fourth child she was acutely malnourished, underweight, and prone to illness. One morning, she collapsed with abdominal pain and bleeding. Her husband rushed her to a nearby clinic,  but they were poorly equipped to handle Zahra’s emergency. The nurse advised Zahra to go to UNFPA Al Ahad Hospital, which offers free reproductive health services.

With no other options, Zahra and her husband walked seven hours to reach the facility. Upon arriving, the staff rushed to treat Zahra’s malnutrition and safely delivered her baby.

In the face of Somalia’s prolonged drought and conflict, women and girls remain among the most vulnerable. Istahil was forced to undergo female genital mutilation at age 9 and then forced into child marriage at 14. She became pregnant when she was still a teenager. During the pregnancy, she didn’t receive adequate prenatal care, leading to a labor that lasted 3 days straight. At the end of her ordeal, Istahil delivered a stillborn baby and developed a fistula, which caused a constant leak of urine and feces that she could not control.

Obstetric fistula, which up to 13,337 women in Somalia suffer from, severed Istahil’s ties to her support system. Her husband left her and, with nowhere else to go, she moved to live with her sisters. Istahil was devastated – until a UNFPA mobile outreach team told her that her condition was treatable. UNFPA provided her with a life-changing fistula repair surgery, putting Istahil on the path to healing both physically and emotionally from her traumatic birth.

When Mumina underwent female genital mutilation (FGM) at seven years old, it was so engrained in her culture that she saw it as something that needed to be done to be like other girls. Tragically, the procedure left Mumina with life-long pain and caused her to endure prolonged labor and hemorrhaging during childbirth. Twice she lost babies due to complications associated with FGM — and she recounts the emotional pain from those  losses to be worse than any physical pain that she has experienced.

Now, at age 34, Mumina is working with UNFPA to change the culture in her community and eradicate the harmful practice. Despite FGM being outlawed in Kenya for over a decade, 75% of girls continue to undergo the procedure by age 14. Mumina encourages community abandonment of the practice — the most effective way to keep girls safe. Collective abandonment prevents any single girl or family from facing alienation by going against tradition. Part of Mumina’s work to end FGM includes facilitating a forum for mothers who have endured FGM and their daughters — who, as a result of community engagement and changing attitudes — have been spared

Lutana is the only female chief of Parque das Tribos in Brazil — and when she became a leader, she knew that one of the things she needed to address was the epidemic of violence against women in her tribe. From 2016-2021, the rate of femicide — the intentional killing of women — increased by over 44% in Brazil. That’s one woman being killed every seven hours.

Lutana reached out to UNFPA to facilitate workshops for survivors of violence and create a safe space to have an open dialogue about the different forms of violence that women had experienced and how they were coping. The workshops then explored how to access local social support networks and legal protection mechanisms. Throughout the workshops, the change in the women who attended was evident. They regained their confidence and realized that enough was enough. Upon reflecting on the workshops, Lutana said: “We, as Indigenous people, are not afraid.”

Even from a young age, Alemtsehay always prioritized her education. But when she was 14, she and her family were forced to leave their home in Ethiopia due to violence. The family, struggling with displacement, saw no other option than to accept an offer of marriage from an older, wealthy man for Alemtsehay’s hand. Horrified, Alemtsehay refused the marriage proposal and insisted on staying in school. Her parents relented, but the older man refused to accept no for an answer.

The man moved closer to Alemtsehay and followed her to school. Fearing that she would be abducted, Alemtsehay ran away to stay with her older sister and enrolled in a new school. The man followed her to the new city. It was at the new school that Alemtsehay learned of a shelter run by UNFPA and was offered a space. She was terrified at first, but after realizing that she was safe from the man at the shelter, Alemtsehay finally relaxed and then, after receiving counseling and other reproductive health services, began to thrive. Alemtsehay stayed in the shelter for 4 years, remained at the top of her class, and now wants to attend university.

Like many rural villages in Sudan, Haleema’s was not well connected to basic public services, such as flour mills or water pumps. She and the other women and children of the village used to have to walk for miles to distant villages to reach flour mills – each long walk exposing them to immense danger. As the conflict in Sudan rages on, women like Haleema are at increased threat for sexual and physical violence. One neighbor of Haleema’s recounted being stopped by six men who demanded payment in exchange for passage. Still other women faced dangers so great that they had to run while carrying their heavy containers of flour. It was clear: the women of Sudan needed necessities that were closer to their homes. So that’s what UNFPA provided.

In 2023 UNFPA built a flour mill in Sudan near Haleema’s home, so the women and children of her community would no longer need to put themselves at risk of violence to eat. Currently, the mill is serving 30,000 people.

Heavily pregnant with twins, Fatima was jolted awake in the early hours of the morning to the sounds of gunfire and screams as violence escalated in her country of Syria. She and her youngest children fled for the river through a constant string of bullets. Once Fatima and her youngest children were safely across the river and living with a host family, she began to suffer from anxiety due to being separated from her husband, oldest son, parents, and doctor. Noticing her stress levels, the family hosting Fatima contacted a UNFPA mobile health team for assistance.

The UNFPA team conducted 3 visits to check on how Fatima was coping with her anxiety and how her pregnancy was progressing. On September 14, UNFPA’s mobile team transferred Fatima to a hospital where she delivered her twins via c-section. In 2023, over 850 pregnant women like Fatima in eastern Syria received safe birth services from UNFPA midwives.

When the first earthquake rocked through the Herat Province of Afghanistan on October 7, 20-year-old Hanifa’s house collapsed on her. Heavily pregnant and now displaced, Hanifa felt lost and hopeless. Then, just a week later, her contractions began. Hanifa was petrified until Rahna, a UNFPA midwife, appeared. Rahna guided Hanifa through the next six hours of intense labor, in which Hanifa’s blood pressure spiked dangerously high. Despite the complications and dangerous conditions, Rahna was able to deliver Hanifa’s baby safely. Recalling the moment the baby was born, Rahna said:  “In the midst of disaster, we brought a glimmer of hope, and that’s a feeling I’ll carry with me forever.”

In the aftermath of the earthquakes, 1.6 million people were affected, including 7,000 pregnant women like Hanifa. Thanks to our supporters, we were able to jump into action immediately, reaching nearly 20,000 people with lifesaving care within just 10 days of the earthquakes. Today, we are operating 117 mobile health teams across Afghanistan.

Sondos, a 26-year-old heavily pregnant woman, was with a group of women and girls when she suddenly heard an explosion. Seconds later, she was buried under rubble. Her young daughter, Habiba, did not survive the blast. Sondos was rushed to a UNFPA hospital and underwent surgery for her severely injured legs and hands as well as an emergency cesarean section. Her newborn daughter, who she named Habiba after the child that she lost the same day, was rushed into intensive care.

In the latter half of 2023, there were more than 235 attacks on healthcare infrastructure in Gaza. The health care system is on its knees and the 73,000 pregnant women in the region are struggling to obtain care. UNFPA has been in Gaza since before the conflict began and has delivered more than half of the births in Gaza since the conflict began on October 7, 2023.

When Umm was 5 months pregnant, she and her family were forced to seek refuge in a remote displacement camp in southwest Yemen. After nearly a decade of brutal civil war in Yemen, as well as a drought exacerbated by climate change, millions of people like Umm have had to make the same choice. She had expected to find safety and peace when she entered the camp, but instead she found herself fighting for every drop of water and every morsel of food. It was while she was walking for hours to fetch water that Umma, malnourished, exhausted, and pregnant, suddenly collapsed.

She was taken to UNFPA’s Al-Sadaqa Hospital where the staff confirmed what she already knew: she had lost the baby. UNFPA treated Umm free of charge, but the loss continues to stay with her to this day. We’re working to urgently scale up our support in Yemen and continue treating women like Umm when the worst occurs – but also so we can treat pregnancy complications earlier.

When armed groups attacked Tantine’s village in the Democratic Republic of Congo, she and her family sought shelter in Rusayo’s displacement camp. She was one of an estimated 4,500 pregnant women in the camp at the time, all of whom lived in cramped, unsanitary conditions. Soon after arriving in the camp, Tantine traveled to a local health center for a prenatal check-up – but after waiting for several hours she was sent back without being seen because the clinic was so overwhelmed. Discouraged, Tantine returned back to the camp, but her luck soon changed when she heard of a UNFPA mobile clinic operating in the camp. Tantine was able to receive prenatal care and, when it came time to deliver, she returned to the mobile clinic.

Recalling the dangerous delivery, Marie, a midwife who assisted Tantine, said: “She arrived with heavy bleeding and the child’s heartbeat wasn’t perceptible. The signs of danger were obvious.” Acting fast, the medical team stabilized Tantine and put her in a UNFPA ambulance to Rusayo’s health center. There, she was treated by midwives and, after a long day of delivery, finally gave birth to a healthy baby.

Organon and UNFPA share a vision of a world where the health of women and girls is prioritized across their lifetime. Together, we are partnering to accelerate progress toward our goals and reduce unplanned pregnancies globally, with a particular focus on young people. The global collaboration includes programs in three key areas: innovation, access and education, and sustainability and financing.

Together, we are helping women realize that their autonomy, power and choice is crucial to addressing the 121 million unplanned pregnancies that occur worldwide each year. Doing so is not only foundational to building a healthier and more equitable world, but will help secure a more prosperous future for the next generation.

In September 2023, USA for UNFPA visited Jordan to see the impact of our support on the ground in one of the world’s top refugee host countries. We visited women, girls, and UNFPA staff at three sites: an urban clinic in Amman, the Zaatari Refugee Camp, and the Azraq Refugee Camp. Scroll to see some photos from the delegation as well as what our attendees had to say about the experience: