Advancing SRHR in Global Health

To ensure that global health priorities and frameworks meet everyone’s needs, it’s crucial to prioritize comprehensive sexual and reproductive health services and reproductive rights (SRHR), especially for adolescent girls. Safeguarding comprehensive SRHR for adolescent girls is not only critical to realizing their full potential, but also central to advancing broader goals of health and gender equality for more feminist, rights-based, climate-resilient, and gender-responsive health policies and systems.

Health systems, as they exist now, are inherently unjust: current frameworks, policies, and agreements uphold the very systems that perpetuate inequality. Existing global health policies and systems have deepened or reinvigorated neoliberal, colonial, capitalist, or patriarchal structures that harm many, especially the most marginalized.

Health systems and policies can only achieve their goal of health for all if they are reshaped as feminist, rights-based, and gender-responsive. Central to this is ensuring that SRHR are available, accessible, and high-quality for girls, women, and gender-diverse people.

To do this, we must:

Establish systems that are people centered and rights-based, recognizing the right to health and SRH, and placing the needs of the most marginalized at the center. 

Apply an intersectional lens, in which we understand the compounding experiences of race, class, age, gender, and other factors. This should be applied not just in service delivery and care, but in research and data.

Understand gender as a social construct at all levels of global health decision-making, actively deconstructing toxic masculinities and harmful gender stereotypes.

Achieve Universal Health Coverage (UHC), regardless of race, age, socio-economic status, or sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, and sex characteristics (SOGIESC).

Decolonize global health and challenge the power dynamics of governments, global health institutions, as well as medical facilities. 

Challenge and dismantle power structures that are currently reinforcing health inequities. 

Because this work requires collective effort, we are also working with partners globally to shape a Feminist Playbook — a shared vision for the world we want to see, including the feminist health systems we need, and the path to achieve it.

Our Focus on Adolescent Girls

To advance these feminist principles in global health, Women Deliver advocates for the right to health and SRHR of adolescent girls. Adolescence is a pivotal time of rapid physical, cognitive, and psychosocial transformation, presenting both significant opportunities and risks for adolescent girls.

Advocating for adolescent girls’ SRHR is not only critical to their individual well-being, but also central to advancing gender equality and improving global health outcomes. By recognizing their rights and needs, as well as shifting power to adolescent girls, we contribute to the development of more feminist health policies and systems that are inclusive, responsive, and equitable. Advancing the right to health and SRHR will consider the unique challenges that adolescent girls face in global health. We work to ensure adolescent girls lead decisions about their own lives, acknowledging them as distinct rights-holders with specific SRHR and health needs.

SEXUAL AND REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH AND RIGHTS ARE NONNEGOTIABLE IN ACHIEVING HEALTH FOR ALL. THIS INCLUDES THE FULL SUITE OF HEALTHCARE SERVICES AVAILABLE AND AFFORDABLE FOR EVERYONE:
  • Comprehensive sexuality education
  • Contraceptive services
  • Maternal and newborn care
  • Treatment of HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted infections
  • Safe abortion care
  • Gender-based violence support
  • Infertility treatments
  • Cancer care
  • Sexual health and well-being
  • Adolescent and youth-friendly SRH services

Women Deliver’s Impact on Universal Health Care

Arush Lal

Women Deliver Young Leader Alum Arush Lal is a Board Member and former Vice Chair for Women in Global Health, and serves as a Commissioner on the Chatham House Commission for Universal Health.

In 2023, Women Deliver provided Arush with financial support and registration to attend the 76th World Health Assembly in Geneva, where he worked with policy makers to advance gender equality in UHC through WHA resolutions.

The Alliance for Gender Equality and UHC serves as a dynamic space for collaboration and coordinated advocacy of over 165 organizations

representing 58 countries advocating for gender-responsive universal health coverage (UHC) in policies, programs, and dialogue. As co-founder and co-convener, Women Deliver strategically focuses on the Alliance to drive collaboration and advocacy for gender-responsive UHC, including advancing SRH services and sexual and reproductive rights for adolescent girls.

Women Deliver aims to influence the World Health Assembly (WHA), which meets annually, to include SRH services and sexual and reproductive rights,

with a particular focus on adolescent girls who are often overlooked in World Health Assembly resolutions. Women Deliver provides technical expertise and consultation on SRHR, UHC, and gender equality across WHO’s work. This allows us to bring the expertise and priorities of traditionally ignored voices into WHO spaces.

Women Deliver works to advance feminist and rights-based health systems that meet the needs of all, especially adolescent girls.