Mwende, a smart 13-year-old girl who dreams of being an engineer, was picking tomatoes in her backyard in the outskirts of Nairobi when a venomous puff adder bit her on the right arm. Although her father rushed her to the hospital, it lacked antivenom medication and the only way to save her life was to amputate her …
Hawa was 12. Arma is 7. Veronica is 11. Vivian is 15. Aisha is 10. All five girls share an increasingly common experience in Liberia: each was raped. Hawa was raped, and killed. They are five out of the 462 sexual violence cases that were reported in Liberia between January and April 2018. At least …
World Family Doctors Day on May 19 was a moment not only to celebrate the commitment, talent and dedication of family physicians across the world, but also to recognise that access to a family doctor is not the reality of all Nigerians. There are about 40,000 registered doctors working in clinics in the cities and …
One day, a student presented to me the case history of a couple—I will call them Mary and John –who had been trying to conceive a child for seven years without success. They could not afford even the most basic medical tests—hormonal tests for her and sperm count tests for him–to determine what the issue …
I met Cecil during a workshop and sharing session on women’s health that I led in rural India; at the end of the workshop, armed with new knowledge, she decided to try to stop the blaming and shaming of the women in her communities for giving birth to girls. For most of Cecil’s life, she …