As 2024 draws to a close, the world is grappling with ever-intensifying crises. UNFPA, the United Nations sexual and reproductive health agency, has just launched a $1.4 billion humanitarian appeal to address the unique needs of women and girls trapped in, or uprooted by, this wave of emergencies.
Yet at the same time, support for the needs of crisis-affected women and girls is under threat. Below are three global trends poised to collide in the year ahead: Without urgent and global action, the world’s most vulnerable women and girls will be caught in the crossfire of all of them.
Violent conflicts, extreme weather events, and forced displacement are reaching record levels. Across these emergency settings, women and girls face unique and often neglected challenges.
To start with, many crises are roiling in countries where women and girls already face systematic disadvantages, imperilling their mobility, agility and ability to access aid. Of the countries facing the highest levels of disaster-related internal displacement, for example, one third rank among the most gender unequal places in the world.
On top of this, in virtually all crises, women and girls face rocketing levels of gender-based violence – roughly twice the rates compared to those in non-humanitarian settings.
All of this plays a role in making crises uniquely harrowing for women and girls – who continue to have their periods, become pregnant and give birth, all while sexual and reproductive health services take a back seat in emergency responses.
UNFPA and its partners are working to ensure these needs are met, even in the most dangerous and deprived places. In 2024, UNFPA reached 10 million people with reproductive health services across 59 crisis-affected countries, support that includes contraception, menstruation supplies, and prenatal, safe delivery and post-natal care. Protection from gender-based violence was provided to 3.6 million people.
Still, this work reached just a small portion of crisis-affected women and girls globally.
