The fifty-sixth session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) began today and will continue through Friday, March 9th. According to the CSW website, delegates from around the world have gathered at the United Nations headquarters in New York City where they aim to “evaluate progress on gender equality, identify challenges, set global standards and formulate concrete policies to promote gender equality and women’s empowerment worldwide.”
The theme of the fifty-sixth session is: The empowerment of rural women and their role in poverty and hunger eradication, development and current challenges.
On Friday, Sarah Costa, Executive Director of the Women’s Refugee Commission, shared a post, Prioritizing Reproductive Health, Empowering Women and Girls, on the Huffington Post’s Global Motherhood blog. In her post, Sarah Costa encouraged participants in the CSW to fully integrate the needs of displaced women and girls into their commitments to action for rural women–and to prioritize access to quality reproductive health services for all women.
Sarah Costa writes:
We will make the point that effective humanitarian assistance programs depend on the full inclusion of displaced women and girls in the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of relief and recovery activities. We will argue that the international community must redouble its efforts to improve protection for refugee women and girls in rural areas, ensure they can go to school and acquire skills training and that they are able to safely earn a living. And we will press for a renewed commitment to quality reproductive health care.
Reproductive healthcare and women’s empowerment go hand in hand. Sometimes, especially in remote settings, access to reproductive healthcare is also a question of life and death. We know that maternal mortality rates are especially high in conflict-affected countries and that displaced women and girls are at very high risk of sexual violence.
Read the full post here.
Watch the webcast of the fifty-sixth session of the CSW here.
Learn more about the Women’s Refugee Commission here.
Maternal Health in Refugee Situations
Wednesday, December 1st, 2010 by Christopher LindahlDuring emergency situations and periods of displacement, reproductive health is sometimes lost in the mix of the problems that arise. However, just because other problems arise doesn’t mean that women don’t need access to health services. A woman doesn’t stop being pregnant if she becomes a refugee. Additionally, the search for durable solutions to displacement often takes years and people shouldn’t be expected to entirely put their lives on hold during a time of displacement.
For example, the Nakivale refugee settlement in Uganda (seen in the video below) is populated largely by Rwandan refugees who fled in the wake of the 1994 genocide, many of whom arrived between 1998-2002 after spending time as refugees in Tanzania. The average time spent in a protracted refugee situation is 17 years. As a result, paying attention to maternal health in emergency and protracted refugee situations is necessary.
One example of integrating maternal health and refugees come from the Women’s Refugee Commission (WRC), which has developed the Minimum Initial Services Package for Reproductive Health. Additionally, with funding from MHTF, WRC is advocating for integration of maternal and reproductive health into disaster risk reduction policies and working with governments to design disaster plans with reproductive health components.
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Tags: displacement, emergency situations, maternal health, maternal health policy, refugees, reproductive health in conflict settings, Uganda, Women's Refugee Commission
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