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Girls in charge: How the Oky period tracker app empowers girls and helps to close the digital divide

March 25, 2025

Girls in charge: How the Oky period tracker app empowers girls and helps to close the digital divide

The Oky app gives girls of all abilities the information they need to manage their periods and answers their questions about sexual and reproductive health. As an inclusive digital solution created ‘by girls, for girls,’ it offers an entry point to practice and improve digital skills.

Midwives and Nurses: Pillars of Libya’s Health System

March 17, 2025

Midwives and Nurses: Pillars of Libya’s Health System

Once reliant on foreign health professionals, Libya is now strengthening its healthcare system by investing in local talent. By providing more modern and practice-oriented education, the country is equipping midwives and nurses with the skills to deliver quality care - ensuring better health outcomes based on capacity building.

A call to action: A new social impact campaign tackles menstrual taboos

February 28, 2025

A call to action: A new social impact campaign tackles menstrual taboos

A global campaign aims to tackle taboos, ignorance and misinformation about menstrual health and hygiene by using the award-winning German-Kenyan social impact film Impure as a catalyst for change.

WHS 2024: Women’s health is key

December 30, 2024

WHS 2024: Women’s health is key

Global leaders unite at the at the World Health Summit 2024 to address the specific health needs of women.

Meaningful refugee participation: how young people are making their voice heard

August 8, 2024

Meaningful refugee participation: how young people are making their voice heard

Development cooperation policymakers are increasingly keen to give refugees a voice in decision-making processes and platforms. But what does meaningful participation look like? And how can development actors best support refugees, particularly young people, to speak out?

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Health and gender

Gender inequity and the stigmatisation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual/transgender, queer, intersexual and asexual persons as well as all other gender identities (LGBTQIA+) can threaten people‘s health and life.

Whether someone is born a man or a woman or an LGBTQIA+ person can impact individual freedoms, employment opportunities, salaries and more to this day. In many countries, women and LGBTQIA+ people also face restrictions on basic human rights such as freedom of expression, their right to education, protection from political persecution and their right to the highest attainable standard of health.  

In the area of sexual and reproductive health and rights, gender inequity manifests itself, for example, wherever women are not free to choose whether to use contraception or whether to carry a pregnancy to term or have an abortion. Gender inequity also takes its toll where women and girls face stigma during their menstrual periods and lack sanitary conditions for menstrual hygiene; where they are exposed to domestic and sexual violence and lack access to emergency services for victims of such violence; and where harmful traditional practices such as female genital mutilation, early marriage and early pregnancy threaten the health and lives of girls and young women. 

Where LGBTQIA+ persons are stigmatised and criminalised, this impedes their access to health services so that, for example, HIV infections cannot be detected and treated at an early stage. It also leads to them being disproportionately affected by physical and sexual violence.

Equal rights and equal opportunities for men and women, girls and boys and LGBTQIA+ persons are fundamental pillars of German development policy and a cross-cutting task for all areas of German development cooperation. The reports and toolkits below show how this commitment is being implemented.

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