YANGON, Myanmar – Twenty-three-year-old Ma Thae Ei Phyu is one of five “red angel” midwives to participate in a recent UNFPA-supported intensive training programme at a maternity ward on the outskirts of the Myanmar capital, Yangon. The programme prepared the red angels – named...

DHARAN, Nepal – Dhani Devi Mukhiya remembers the days when her relatives shunned her in public and her husband threatened to bring home another wife. For some of the villagers in her community in Nepal, the obstetric fistula that she lived with for seven years was ‘punishment...

KABUL, Afghanistan – “I was 15 years old when I got married, and my husband was 22. My sister-in-law saw me at one of my relative’s wedding and made all the arrangements for her brother to have me,” Sharifa recalls. Forty years later, she describes this as the start of a life...