International Women’s Day

Sunday, March 8

International Women’s Day is a time to reflect on progress made and to plan for the future. With partners, CDC works to improve the health and safety of women and girls around the world. Below are examples of programs to prevent violence, maternal deaths, and birth defects.

Implications of Latrines on Women’s and Girls’ Safety (Haiti)Violence against women and girls can be prevented or reduced in humanitarian settings. Woman and girls are vulnerable to rape and other violent acts.

The location and lighting of public latrines is only one of the safety issues in displacement camps.
By including gender-based violence prevention and response activities into their normal tasks, the humanitarian field as a whole will have increased capacity to respond to and prevent this type of violence.

Saving Mothers, Giving Life (Zambia and Uganda)
Saving Mothers, Giving Life is designed to rapidly reduce deaths related to pregnancy and childbirth in high-mortality settings. Results indicate that SMGL interventions are effective.

Maternal mortality fell sharply (by 30%) in just 1 year in Uganda’s four SMGL districts. It also declined by 35% in health facilities that implemented SMGL interventions in both Uganda and Zambia.
The percentage of all births in SMGL districts that occurred at health facilities increased during Phase 1 from 46% to 74% in Uganda (a 62% increase) and from 63% to 84% in Zambia (a 35% increase).
The percentage of all facilities performing specific life-saving obstetric interventions increased.
SMGL districts showed improvement in treatment for HIV-positive mothers and prevention for their infants.

Birth Defects COUNT (numerous countries)
Birth Defects COUNT is a global initiative to reduce neural tube defects. Increasing folic acid intake among women of childbearing age can help prevent 150,000-210,000 of the more than 300,000 neural tube defects that occur each year in low- and middle-resource countries.

CDC works with the World Health Organization and other partners on three focus areas: science, partnerships, and public health policy.
CDC offers field epidemiology training programs to help countries develop, set up and implement dynamic public health strategies to improve and strengthen their systems and infrastructures.
Reliable birth defects surveillance data helps better define the true burden of neural tube defects, and develop and assess the impact of prevention activities.