Good sexual and reproductive health is important for quality of life for all people, yet there are myriad challenges to ensuring this for cis-gender and transgender women and girls around the world.
Contraception, protection from sexually transmitted infections, maternity care, safe abortion care, counselling and self-care tools are all important enablers for women to have an active and positive sexual life, free from physical or psychological suffering. But taboos and fears among communities at large, friends and families, even women themselves, cast a negative light instead, creating barriers to women’s wellbeing.
Unmarried women, adolescents and girls, sex workers, women among the LGBTQI+ community or those already living with a stigmatised condition can be especially excluded from information, care and support.
In recent years, Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders/MSF) has tackled this in increasingly diverse ways. Projects in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Greece, Honduras and Zimbabwe have shown that strengthening women’s own agency and community support can work hand-in-hand to enable positive engagement with women’s sexual and reproductive health needs in a way that reverberates through the social fabric.
In each of these countries, women, girls, men, parents and neighbours have a compelling story to share as they participate in and drive this change.
Individual videos and articles shine a spotlight on Marvellous, a teen mother in Zimbabwe; Nadia, a sex worker in Honduras; Yuli, a transgender woman from Cuba in Greece; and the communities of Salamabila and Matete in DRC.