#accessible-sanitary-products

#accessible-sanitary-products

In late 2025, the United States shocked the world by suspending global health aid, leading experts to predict 700,000 additional deaths annually, primarily among children. This prompted the US to propose unusual bilateral health agreements with developing countries, which have drawn criticism for being exploitative.

Ju Young Lee, one of the researchers behind the scan, has said she's amazed it has taken so long for a project like this to materialise. The clitoris has long been understudied and misunderstood.

"The hands of women farmworkers are something very valuable. Women are indispensable in the fields. You can look at any farm, and you see mainly women."

"The specific barrier is capital," says Lisa George, global head of the Macquarie Group Foundation. "Without access to capital, it's very hard to get social mobility and educational mobility in life."

"[After] years of holding pain, you become really tight in yourself...you hold yourself tight and you don't want to take up space."

Women are responsible for collecting water in more than 70% of rural households that do not have access to mains water across the developing world. Women and girls collectively spend 250m hours a day collecting water globally. The climate crisis is exacerbating the problem, according to a new report from the UN.

I'm a pub cook. I don't make a lot of money. And I can't do insurance through my spouse - so Medicaid it is. I just want a doctor to help guide me with a medical thing. How is it crazy to want that?

For more than 60 years, contraception has been almost exclusively a women's responsibility. Today, women have more than 14 modern contraceptive options, while men have just two: condoms and vasectomies. That imbalance has pushed women to shoulder physical side effects, financial burden, medical risks, and the career impact of family planning-costs that have been accepted as the "status quo" for far too long.

In the displacement camps of Ad-Damazin in southeastern Sudan's Blue Nile State, the war is reshaping social norms and introducing new realities that are forcing Sudanese women into manual labour to survive. Rasha is a displaced mother. She has ignored old boundaries and perceptions of what a man's work is and started working as a woodcutter to feed her children. Carpentry is hard, but the axe has become an extension of my hand, Rasha told Al Jazeera Arabic.

Then we circled back to the question that won't leave us alone. Do we bring a second child into this world, or do we stop at one? It's the most intimate climate question I've ever faced. Not a reusable bag choice. Not a diet tweak. A lifelong decision that will shape our home, our time, and yes, our footprint. I'm not alone in wrestling with this.

The truth, of course, is that anyone can contract HIV, given the right circumstance, and according to the Yale University Library's online exhibition " We Are Everywhere: Lesbians in the Archive," by 1991 roughly 40% of HIV-positive people and 12% of AIDS patients in the U.S. were women. But a combination of longstanding bias in the medical field and the perception of HIV/AIDS as a gay epidemic led to women being excluded from research studies and clinical trials.

According to research by the World Economic Forum and United Nations Development Programme, the circular economy could unlock $4.5 trillion in new global value by 2030, and investors are racing to capture part of that opportunity. Meet Elizabeth Blankenship-Singh, Director of Innovation at Overlay Capital, an Atlanta-based alternative investment firm whose Waste and Materials Fund is backing both early-stage materials innovators and later-stage recycling operations with established infrastructure.

By attaching near the ear, the device targets the auricular branches of the trigeminal and vagus nerves to regulate menstrual cycle symptoms and help the body return to a rested state. These nerves play an important role throughout the menstrual cycle and release estrogen and progesterone, two essential sex hormones. They also target muscle contraction, blood flow, digestion, and more, a few body functions that change during a period, which explains the increase in cramps and tightening of blood vessels.

NPR's global health and development team tells stories about life in our changing world, focusing on low- and middle-income countries also referred to as the Global South. And we keep in mind that we're all neighbors in this global village. NPR receives financial support for this team from the Gates Foundation. NPR is solely responsible for all content. Find more about NPR's standards and practices at NPR.org/ethics, as well as a list of our philanthropic supporters in our annual report.