Moz sex workers affected by the Mexico City Policy

Women's Health

A sex worker shows off her late night dress at their living quarters which is also where they bring clients at night in Tete, Tete province, Mozambique May 11, 2018. The NGO, International Centre for Reproductive Health (ICRH) lost it's US funding in 2018 to help sex workers in the Tete province. ICRH would help sex workers become peer educators so they could help educate women about their rights and their health. Since ICRH has been defunded, there has been another local organization that has stepped in, but they don't understand the issues as well, and the peer educators find it harder to work with them.

Although abortion was only decriminalized recently in Mozambique many NGOs decided they couldn’t sign Trump’s reinstated Mexico City Policy because they needed to be able to tell women about all family planning options. The US policy makes it impossible for USAID recipients to take any funding related to abortion. For the NGO International Centre for Reproductive Health (ICRH) who refused to sign, most of their work which was educating and helping sex workers suffered because of the cuts. They applied to other donors for funding and restarted some of their programs, but because in the gap between services, a lot of women did not receive critical health services or the counseling they needed. I received a grant to cover this from the International Women’s Media Foundation and it was published in Ms. Magazine and Witness.