Highlights

• The world’s humanitarian crises are enormous and ever-growing, as is the need for assistance—including assistance in meeting the sexual and reproductive health needs of women and adolescent girls.
• Despite progress in recent decades—especially related to the development of standards to address sexual and reproductive health in crisis settings—services on the ground have lagged far behind the need, because of challenges relating to culture and ideology, insufficient data, financial and resource constraints, and inadequate health care systems.
• Prevention, preparedness and resiliency are increasingly recognized as crucial to equipping communities to avoid crises, endure their effects and get on the path to recovery more quickly.
• U.S. leadership has been vital to addressing sexual and reproductive health needs in humanitarian situations, and that leadership is needed more than ever as global crises and needs proliferate and nationalism is on the rise.