Health

Although recent decades have seen rapid improvements in health technology, women in developing nations have yet to benefit from such advancements.

Women lack power in the private sphere regarding decisions about sex, as well as in the public realm of health care policy. Discrimination against women often begins at birth with high rates of female infanticide and neglect, including malnutrition and failure to address illness in young girls. Violence against women is a major public health challenge that results in sexually transmitted diseases afflicting five times as many women as men.

Many countries place severe restrictions on reproductive choice, forbidding sex education, contraception and medically safe abortion -- indeed, unsafe abortions have become one of the highest causes of maternal mortality. Women's low status is also evidenced by high rates of female anemia and malnutrition, which, together with traditional practices, such as early marriage and female genital mutilation, contribute to high rates of both maternal mortality and infant mortality. Mental illness also remains undiagnosed and untreated in large numbers of women worldwide. 

Our grants support HIV prevention and awareness, provide reproductive health and sexual education programs for adolescent girls and young women, and fund programs aimed at increasing women's access to health care.