(A reflection on CSW69 and the need for transformative health responses in emergencies)
As humanitarian crises multiply across the globe, from Gaza to Sudan to Yemen, the health needs of women and girls in conflict zones remain consistently underserved. Despite decades of global health and humanitarian interventions, current systems often fail to center gender, trauma, and long-term well-being within emergency responses. The result is not only service gaps but the continued marginalization of the most affected communities — particularly women, the elderly, people with chronic diseases, and those living with disabilities.
This short reflection emerged following my participation at the 69th Commission on the Status of Women (CSW69), held at the UN Headquarters in New York from 10 to 21 March 2025. While global commitments to advance women’s rights were discussed and the space offered valuable dialogue, I was struck by how often critical intersections between conflict, gender, health, and humanitarian action remain underexplored in global forums such as these. In particular, conversations on sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), mental health, and trauma care are frequently sidelined within broader discussions of peace, security, and development.
Indeed, the fragmentation of SRHR services, the limited attention to mental health and intergenerational trauma, and the absence of continuity for noncommunicable disease (NCD) care in emergencies are not accidental oversights. They reflect structural limitations within the design of humanitarian health systems themselves — systems that remain largely reactive, biomedical, and dominated by security-driven and state-centered approaches.
Conflict is rarely framed as a gendered experience, and global health diplomacy spaces continue to exclude or marginalize the leadership and expertise of young women from conflict-affected regions. Their perspectives, grounded in lived experience, are critical not only for visibility but for reimagining more effective and accountable systems.
To move beyond these limitations, there is a need to fundamentally rethink health system responses in humanitarian settings. This requires shifting from charity-based, top-down interventions toward approaches that are gender-responsive, trauma-informed, survival-oriented, and decolonized by design.
A reimagined approach to strengthening health systems in humanitarian contexts must prioritize:
Palestine stands as a striking example of these intersecting failures. In Gaza, health infrastructure is systematically targeted, and women face extraordinary barriers to basic care. Yet Palestinian experts, advocates, and health workers are rarely positioned as key actors within global humanitarian policy-making.
If we are serious about achieving global security, we must recognize that there is no global security without global health security — and no health security without SRHR at its core. Justice, dignity, and health cannot be delivered through systems that reproduce the power asymmetries of conflict.
The call, therefore, is not simply to improve what exists, but to transform the way we imagine humanitarian health — building systems that are responsive to gendered realities, accountable to communities, and capable of upholding health as a right, even in the harshest of circumstances.