When humanitarian aid is cut, women and girls lose access to essential health services like those provided by UNFPA.

As violence intensifies in places like Palestine, Afghanistan, and Yemen, healthcare workforces are dwindling and resources cannot keep up with the need. These operational strains on top of funding cuts force humanitarian relief organizations like UNFPA to focus on only the most immediate, lifesaving services.

In Afghanistan, over 600 female health workers have been lost, and Yemen has lost nearly 1,500 service providers. Multiple countries worldwide are losing staff at alarming rates as case managers for survivors of violence, counselors who deliver psychosocial support, and mobile healthcare teams disappear. 

Without adequate funding and staffing, many women and girls are losing the frontline response aid that provides lifesaving care in already-devastating circumstances.

At UNFPA, we work to provide lifesaving care in the areas where women and girls need it most, but they rely on your support to ensure we can reach them. Can you make a gift today to ensure that women and girls are not overlooked in this healthcare worker shortage?

Due to severe funding cuts, in 2025 UNFPA will no longer be able to provide training for some 800 midwives – more than half of those planned to be supported. © UNFPA Yemen

A shortage in trained midwives, psychosocial support specialists, and other healthcare workers risks the lives of women and girls across the globe. In Yemen, 25-year-old Hanan died from birth complications because the district hospital she went to could no longer afford to keep an obstetrician on staff.

Midwife Akaber wasn’t able to save Hanan’s life. She told UNFPA, “I couldn’t stop the bleeding – she needed the attention of an obstetric gynecologist… I provided assistance, but the baby was already dead.”

UNFPA supported this hospital by providing maternal health medicines, stocking medical supplies, and deploying health workers such as midwives and other specialists. However, due to steep funding cuts, we had to suspend our support at the end of March 2025, stripping 1.5 million women of access to critical health services, including 600,000 women who will be deprived of care of a trained midwife when they need it.

Over a decade of crisis and conflict have destroyed 60% of Yemen’s hospitals. 19.5 million people are in need of humanitarian aid and nearly half of the population is acutely hungry, making the promise of a safe pregnancy and childbirth uncertain. Women and girls’ risks of violence, exploitation, and abuse have soared, driven by lost income, psychological distress, food scarcity, and dire living conditions.

A UNFPA midwife in Al-Nashama Hospital, Al-Ma'afir District, Tai’z Governorate in Yemen.

In the face of funding and staffing shortages, UNFPA and our partners are working to restore a dependable network of reproductive health and protection services for women and girls to rely on. The road ahead is long, but the objective is clear: we will continue our work to provide consistent, staffed, and safe care so women and girls are not left to face childbirth, violence, and trauma alone — and we can do so with gifts from supporters like you.

Your support can make a lifesaving difference for women and girls across the world who have nowhere else to turn. Please, make a gift to provide women and girls the sexual and reproductive healthcare they need, when they need it, and wherever they are — no matter what.

Thank you for being there for women and girls.

— USA for UNFPA