White Ribbon Alliance Commitment to Deliver What Women Want through 2030: “Listening to women is radical; acting on their demands is revolutionary.”
Commitment description:White Ribbon Alliance, a global network of advocates for reproductive, maternal and newborn health and rights, commits to moving from making the voices of women’s and adolescent girls’ more loudly heard as part of the What Women Want campaign, to demanding and taking action that places health power and decision-making squarely with women and girls.
What Women Want asked more than 1.2 million women and girls worldwide their top demand for their reproductive and maternal health. They overwhelmingly asked for respectful and dignified care, ranging from being treated with compassion and understanding for their choices by providers, to experiencing clean health facilities with running water and indoor toilets.
Such asks are not luxuries; they are life savers. If we want women and girls to visit health centers, if we want better health outcomes, including zero preventable maternal deaths, if we want universal health coverage, if we want a world where girls grow up positioned to understand and direct their own sexual and reproductive health, their agenda must become everyone’s agenda.
White Ribbon Alliance will work to honor the voices of What Women Want, ensuring that health leaders and influencers, including ourselves, are directly accountable to women’s and girls’ demand for respectful and dignified care – and that we continually listen and act on what women and girls tell us. We will achieve this by advocating for:
• 12 countries to implement the Respectful Maternity Care Charter: Universal Rights of Women and Newborns as part of their public sector health system, including investing in working redress systems.
• 8 countries and 4 donors to institute transparent mechanisms wherein women and girls self-articulated needs are captured and used to drive their health policy and program priorities.
• 100 influential health champions in 10 countries join with the WASH community to call for investment in clean water and toilets in government health facilities
Achieve universal access to sexual and reproductive health as a part of universal health coverage (UHC)(3) Zero preventable maternal deaths and maternal morbidities, such as obstetric fistulas, by, inter alia, integrating a comprehensive package of sexual and reproductive health interventions, including access to safe abortion to the full extent of the law, measures for preventing and avoiding unsafe abortions, and for the provision of post-abortion care, into national UHC strategies, policies and programmes, and to protect and ensure all individuals’ right to bodily integrity, autonomy and reproductive rights, and to provide access to essential services in support of these rights.
