While economists and development professionals generally extol the benefits of industrial development, few mention the hidden costs of increased deaths and fatalities at work. Women are amongst the injured and dead as they have “enjoyed” the greatest rise in labour force participation, mainly in lowly paid, low skill manufacturing jobs. Increasingly women’s work is dispersed, […]

In the Fourth World Conference on Women that took place in Beijing in 1995 governments agreed on the Platform For Action (PFA). It highlighted twelve areas of critical concern, one of which is women and health. This report is an outcome of the first regional effort in Asia- Pacific by women NGOs to systematically monitor […]

Women need to have control of their lives in order to be physically and mentally healthy. Poverty, gender power relations, gender discrimination and violence against women as the main social determinants of women’s mental health have reduced this control and thus these factors need to be urgently addressed. Central to women’s NGO work in Asia […]

To this day, women continue to die from the age-old and most common complications of pregnancy and childbirth – hemorrhage, infections, unsafe abortion, obstructed labour, and the hypertensive disorders of pregnancy. In 1995, the latest estimated number of maternal deaths globally was 515,000. Of these deaths, 53 per cent (272,000) occurred in Africa, 42 per […]