Global Health Promise

History of Global Health Promise

Global Health Promise (GHP) was founded in 2007 to address the maternal health of women and girls who are trafficked or in sex work and their children. This programmatic focus grew out of research and experience prior to 2007 on the public health impact of sex trafficking and discussions with female sex workers (FSW). During this work we found that the focus on sex trafficking and sex work was HIV, yet we met many women in sex work who became pregnant and gave birth but did not receive any, or very limited, maternal health care. In 2013, we conducted research in Cambodia that produced the first study to ever document maternal deaths among FSW. Since then, we have conducted other studies confirming maternal mortality among women and girls who are trafficked or in sex work, as well as deaths of their children, including our study from 2019 in eight countries, which is the largest ever study on deaths of FSW, the first ever multi-country study on deaths of FSW, and the first to document deaths of FSW from suicide, including maternal suicide.

Our name reflects the reality that millions of women and girls who are trafficked or in sex work and become pregnant is a Global issue; that they have a right to respectful, quality maternal Health care; and we made a Promise to work on this issue to a group of mothers who support their children through sex work in Kathmandu in 2006.

GHP has four primarily activities: research; programs; advocacy; and building strategic partnerships.

Our research focuses on the maternal health of FSW, including maternal mortality. These studies focus on antenatal care among FSW and where they give birth. We also research causes of maternal mortality among FSW and causes of death among their children in order to prevent these deaths.

Our research informs or programs. Based on a study we were conducting in Nigeria in 2022, we identified many maternal deaths of FSW that occurred in brothels when the pregnant FSW could not afford to give birth in a hospital with trained medical staff. Based on these preliminary results, we launched our Maternal, Neonatal, and Child Health (MNCH) Program in Lagos and Calabar, Nigeria in the fall of 2022. Since then, we have expanded the program to Abuja, Port Hardcourt, Umuahia, and Enugu, Nigeria, as well as Kampala, Uganda, and several cities in Kenya.

Our research and programs inform our advocacy through which we share the results of our research and programmatic work with our local partners, at conferences, with other NGOs, US government agencies, and UN organizations, as well as on social media and through our publications.

Finally, we build strategic partnerships among our local partners in the countries where we work as well as with other local and international NGOs.

GHP philosophy: (1) we work with mothers; these mothers are trafficked or support their children through sex work but, first, they are mothers; we work with children whose mothers are trafficked or support them through sex work; these are children, not “children of sex workers”; and these mothers and their children are families. Therefore, we take a family-centric approach to addressing the immediate, intermediate, and long-term needs of these families.

(2) We are rights-based organization and believe that all mothers who are trafficked or in sex work have a right to respectful and quality maternal health care; that the children whose mothers are trafficked or in sex work have right to quality health care and education; and that mothers who are trafficked and in sex work and their children deserve to protection from discrimination and stigma.

We partner with local organizations on our programs to both address the needs of the families we work with and empower our local partners.