“For women who want to plan their families and their husbands won’t let them, I tell them to come with their kids to my house in the afternoon and we take advantage to talk about family planning.”

Lichita, a health promoter in rural El Salvador, reaches out to women with...

“Before we elected our committee, the nurse-midwife would come, take a walk around the village and leave. We did not know who she vaccinated nor did we know how many women were pregnant. Now we catch her and get our work done.”

Parvati, a mother of three in her 40s, is a...

“Before, we heard that they treated young people poorly. But now the nurses have all been nice to us. They even go visit the teen club members who have just had their babies.”

In El Salvador the vulnerability of adolescents’ sexual health is illuminated by two statistics. For...

“Supportive supervision helped me gain the confidence to perform up to standards.”

Rajabeti, an Auxiliary Nurse-Midwife in the Firozabad district of Uttar Pradesh, India, was nervous and couldn’t pass her first follow-up examination after IUD insertion training as part of the...

“Now I have the self-respect to just say ‘no’ to boys, and I know I can use condoms if I want to have sex.”

Sarah—a teenager in Uganda’s Jinja District—watched three of her friends drop out of school in 1998 when they became pregnant. As a “disco kid” she was at risk of...