The silent catastrophe: Abandoning women and girls in crisis

Al Arabiya

3 days ago

In crises across the Arab States region, where humanitarian needs have soared to unprecedented levels, a disturbing trend is unfolding: the systematic defunding of life-saving services for women and girls. From Somalia to Sudan, Syria to Yemen, and beyond, drastic funding cuts – notably the abrupt termination of US financial support – are precipitating what can only be described as a silent catastrophe. This isn't merely about abstract statistics; it's about lives shattered and futures stolen as critical reproductive health and gender-based violence services are dismantled precisely when and where they are needed most.
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Consider Joud, driven by conflict to a displacement camp in Al-Hol, north-eastern Syria. She never imagined having more children, with health services virtually non-existent and pregnancy feeling too risky. Yet, the opening of a UNFPA-supported maternity clinic gave her the confidence to embrace motherhood again. Now, she fears this lifeline may close. As she poignantly states: 'Without it, pregnant women will face their most precious and precarious moments alone — without care, without safety, and without hope." Her story underscores a grim reality: the decision to defund reproductive health and protection services is not a simple financial adjustment, but a profound denial of the most basic, life-saving support women and girls desperately require and deserve.
The reality is stark: severe funding shortages have ripped away essential services from millions of the most vulnerable. In Lebanon, nearly half of UNFPA-supported women and girls' safe spaces — providing safety, counseling, medical treatment, and legal referrals, critical for survivors of violence — have been forced to close their doors. In Somalia, mobile outreach programs that delivered integrated reproductive health and gender-based violence services to an estimated 250,000 women have ceased entirely. Across Yemen, a staggering 1.5 million women and girls no longer have access to life-saving services. These are not abstract figures; they represent safe havens, vital medical care, and a lifeline for individuals facing unimaginable hardship.
Even before recent cuts, health services in crisis-affected countries in the region were alarmingly precarious. In Syria, less than half of health facilities remain functional after 14 years of civil war. Funding for gender-based violence programs in Sudan was less than 20 percent of financial needs in 2024 as the number of people at risk soared to over 12 million. Yet, women-led organizations and services for survivors of gender-based violence were among the hardest and earliest hit by this year's aid cuts.
Cuts to humanitarian funding are not merely budget decisions; they are profoundly, unequivocally, life-and-death choices. When the services designed to protect women's health, safety, and dignity vanish, what message do we, the global community, send? That their suffering is invisible. That their lives simply do not matter. This is utterly unacceptable. The closure of services, drastic staff cuts, and suspension of essential programming, such as emergency obstetric care and medical care for survivors of violence, represents a profound moral failure that will put the lives of women and girls at risk. We cannot stand by as the fragile progress made in advancing women and girls' rights and well-being is brutally eroded.
Urgent and sustained donor contributions are not merely desirable; they are an absolute, immediate necessity to prevent a deeper, irreparable humanitarian catastrophe in these already fragile countries. The lives, dignity, and futures of millions depend on our collective action. To turn our backs now is to commit an irreversible injustice.