When women and girls have access to high-quality health care, they are empowered to support their families, contribute to their communities and help build strong nations.
We believe that the future is female – and will be shaped by the 1.2 billion young people coming of age in the world today. Adolescence is a crucial time to set young women on a path toward a healthy future. Girls who are poor, have little education or live in rural areas are more likely than their peers to become pregnant, putting their and their newborn’s lives at risk.
Better access to sexual and reproductive health education and services enables young women to realize their full potential. When they’re equipped with the tools and knowledge to avoid unwanted pregnancies, they’re more likely to finish school. When they have access to contraceptives and comprehensive sexual health information they can avoid sexually-transmitted infections (like HIV and HPV) and the associated lifelong treatment costs – setting them up for healthy and empowered lives.
We believe that reproductive health care is essential to the wellbeing of women and their families. Around 300,000 women die every year from pregnancy- and childbirth-related complications, 99% of them in developing countries. Women are also particularly vulnerable to a number of diseases. Cervical cancer, which is entirely preventable, kills more than 270,000 women every year.
We work with our partners to advocate for expanded access to high-quality care before, during and after birth, as well as regular cervical cancer and STI screenings that have the potential to save hundreds of thousands of maternal and newborn lives, enabling women to support their families and break out of inter-generational cycles of poverty.
We help our clients advocate for improved health services for women and girls throughout every phase of their lives – starting in adolescence, and continuing through pregnancy and adulthood.
At GHS, a day working to improve the lives of women and adolescent girls may mean:
- Creating key messages, opinion pieces and graphics that position cross-cutting investments in girls and women as central to development and progress for all
- Researching the media landscape related to family planning and abortion services in a priority country or region
- Organizing media scholarships, trainings, roundtables and interviews to encourage global journalists to attend and write about major conferences on women’s health and rights
- Inviting journalists to visit a clinic to see and hear first-hand how local communities access maternal and newborn health services
- Developing a communications strategy for the launch of a new report on progress toward goals that are essential for gender equality
- Coordinating global press briefings timed to new commitments from governments, industry partners and private philanthropies