International Women’s Day: Women #MakeItHappen on the Frontlines of Global Health

By Aanjalie Collure, IntraHealth International Photo by Jonathan Torgovnik/Reportage by Getty Images Today, March 8, when the global community comes together for International Women’s Day to celebrate the achievements of women around the world, we recognize women’s central contribution to the global health workforce: a contribution that sadly often goes unnoticed in global health policy discussions. When we take a moment to imagine what the world would actually be like without women working on the frontlines of global health, we realize how indispensable women are to the frontline health workforce we need to achieve global health goals. If we were to imagine a world without female health workers, we would overlook the heroic efforts of Josephine Finda Sellu, a deputy nurse matron from Sierra Leone who has risked her life on the frontlines of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa this past year. In an interview with the New York Times in August 2014, Ms. Sellu – one of the last “nurse survivors” of Ebola at her hospital – cries while describing the tragic loss of her colleagues; yet, through her tears, bravely declares her commitment to fight the deadly disease until its complete eradication. Similarly, if we were to imagine a world without female health workers, we would ignore the life-saving work of Dr. Shamail Azimi of the International Medical Corps, the first female physician to enter Afghanistan following the demise of the Taliban regime in 2001. After being inspired and encouraged by her father to complete her medical studies, Dr. Azimi led a team of female health workers to Afghan cities with absolutely no health workers to assist mothers in the safe delivery of their children. Dr. Azimi has not only provided these critical life-saving services, but trained hundreds of local physicians, community health workers, traditional birth attendants, and obstetricians throughout Afghanistan. Tragically, if we were to imagine a world without female health workers, we would ignore the enormous contribution of Nepal’s body of 50,000 female health volunteers, who have bridged rural communities to the country’s formal health system since the 1990s. Their efforts have been integral to achieving universal coverage of vitamin A supplementation, drastically cutting maternal mortality rates, and slashing under-5 mortality rates by approximately 64%. In fact, if we were to imagine a world without female health workers, we would be discounting the life-saving work of over 75% of the health workforce in many countries. Female health workers are the muscle behind the strong push to achieve global health goals around the world – whether it be providing maternal and child health services to rural communities in Nepal, fighting for an AIDS-free generation in South Africa, or providing critical services during periods of armed conflict. Despite this, the World Health Organization notes that there are enormous gender disparities in health workforce management positions and higher-skilled cadres. Women constitute a much smaller proportion of management and other decision-making positions, and are also often poorly represented in higher paying cadres, including dentists, pharmacists and skilled physicians. Additionally, female health workers struggle with having their work recognized and legitimated by colleagues, families, and wider communities in many areas. These gender disparities have been largely unaddressed by health workforce policy planners, argues Hilary Standing of the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex. Poor data on the gendered composition of health workforces in different countries, and in the educational and other personal barriers women face in health workforce recruitment processes, mean that policymakers do not fully realize the extent of how important these considerations must be in health workforce policy planning processes. On International Women’s Day, we not only celebrate the life-saving contributions of female health workers around the world, but call for additional action to ensure these women are safe, well-equipped, well-supported, and well-recognized in their roles. Men, like Dr. Azimi’s father, also play an important part in supporting and championing the efforts of female health workers around the world. Together, we can build the health workforce we need – underpinned by strong, intelligent and compassionate women and men alike – to achieve healthy, happy livelihoods for all of us.