Women’s Health
Women around the world are too often denied basic health care and human rights. At EGPAF, we work to provide access to integrated care and ensure comprehensive HIV service delivery, alongside reproductive and sexual health care to women, youth, and their families in all of our supported settings.
Gender inequality and discrimination place both girls and boys at greater risk of HIV, sexually transmitted infections, and unwanted pregnancies. Adolescent girls and young women are particularly vulnerable to HIV acquisition, with about 5,000 newly infected with HIV weekly, around the world. This can be attributed to intergenerational sex, gender inequality, harmful gender norms, sexual and gender-based violence, and low education and empowerment of girls.
EGPAF aims to mobilize and empower young women and men, while creating a health system that holistically addresses their needs.
Learn more about EGPAF’s approach to reducing the risk among adolescents.
Family Planning and Reproductive Health Services
EGPAF offers a comprehensive and integrated approach to reproductive health care in supported settings. We work with community leaders to empower and mobilize women and men to engage in reproductive health care. In many of our settings, we offer reproductive health services along with prevention of mother-to-child HIV transmission (PMTCT) and HIV care and treatment, including family planning education and commodities, voluntary medical male circumcision, pre- and post-exposure prophylaxis, testing and treatment of sexually transmitted infections, testing and treatment of opportunistic infections, and testing and treatment of reproductive cancers.
We support comprehensive counseling on family planning options to ensure that HIV-positive women avoid unwanted pregnancies, and we promote accessible and sustained access to lifelong antiretroviral therapy among HIV-positive women who wish to become pregnant, in order to prevent transmission to their children.
Sexual and Gender-based Violence
Sexual and gender-based violence affect many of the individuals and communities we aim to serve. We’ve scaled models in several countries to create greater dialogue about this issue, working with community leaders and with assault survivors to treat violence holistically. Services entail counseling, treatment of physical trauma and infections, and provision of post-exposure prophylaxis.
Cervical Cancer
Cervical cancer is one of the leading causes of mortality among women in Africa—among HIV-positive women, the risks are exacerbated. In several settings, EGPAF created wider access to vaccines to prevent human papilloma virus (the leading cause of cervical cancer). In many other locations, we’ve scaled up use of visual inspection of the cervix with acetic acid to allow health workers to identify early signs of cervical cancer easily. In Lesotho, EGPAF has created a center of excellence for both identification and treatment of this deadly cancer. This center provides mentorship and technical assistance to other health sites to support health workers at large to address cervical cancer.
