Mizzima
The World Health Organization has released a statement for the women on Myanmar on International Women’s Day on 8 March.
The following is the statement:
International Women’s Day comes at a time of profound challenge in Myanmar. Women’s rights are not privileges to be held only in times of peace – they are universal, inalienable and must be upheld at all times. Protecting and resourcing the rights of Myanmar’s women and girls is an immediate responsibility.
Across Myanmar, as conflict intensifies, displacement rises and essential systems collapse, women have increasingly been thrust into roles of leadership and responsibility for ensuring the survival of families and communities. Women are demonstrating extraordinary resilience—yet resilience alone does not replace their right to protection, justice, and meaningful participation.
When health services fail, women become caregivers without support. When schools close or families cannot afford fees, girls are most often denied education while mothers shoulder the additional childcare. When food becomes scarce, women reduce their own portions so others can eat. When men are killed, injured, detained, forcibly recruited or unable to return home, women assume responsibility for keeping children safe, holding households together and securing income while rebuilding from disruption.
Violence is also increasingly reaching women and girls directly – in their homes, in displacement sites, and during daily tasks such as gathering food, water or fuel, where insecurity and explosive hazards add further risk. Women who are already marginalised – including by ethnicity, disability, age or other identity – experience these pressures in compounded ways. Displaced women separated from extended family and community support face heightened barriers to childcare, livelihoods, and safety. This is courage and resilience. But this is not justice.
The cumulative burden of conflict, displacement, economic insecurity and violence is both physical and psychological. Women and girls often carry invisible wounds of trauma, grief and chronic stress, frequently without access to mental health and psychosocial support.
Year after year, the support systems that women and girls rely on are shrinking. The impacts are not abstract: fewer shelters for survivors of violence, fewer skilled birth attendants, more untreated health conditions, rising trafficking and exploitation, and fewer opportunities for girls to stay in school. Families are forced into impossible choices, and very often women and girls pay the price. Women from Myanmar’s diverse ethnic communities, including those facing longstanding discrimination, experience these harms in distinct and often intensified ways.
Despite these escalating pressures women across Myanmar are leading through this crisis. Despite shrinking civic space, increasing pressures, surveillance and severe financial constraints, women-led and community-based organizations are delivering protection, food, referrals and care where access is constrained. Despite extraordinary barriers, women continue to advocate for their rights and priorities and those of their communities, often within the few political spaces available to them. This perseverance is extraordinary, but endurance is not justice.
Protection from gender-based violence must be recognised and delivered as life-saving assistance, including sustained funding for sexual and reproductive health services, maternal health care, survivor-centred services and safe spaces for women and girls. Women-led and community-based organisations cannot be expected to hold communities together while operating with shrinking resources and under increasing risk. Leadership and decision-making on peace, security and Myanmar’s future cannot remain the sole domain of men and armed actors.
To address both immediate needs and the structural inequalities driving this crisis humanitarian and recovery efforts must adopt gender-responsive and transformative approaches that recognise unpaid care, economic and educational inequality, and barriers to women’s leadership and meaningful participation. Access constraints must not render women invisible in data or decision-making. Women’s and girls’ leadership and inclusion must be deliberate and central to any pathway toward peace and stability – not symbolic inclusion, but a precondition for lasting solutions.
Rights cannot wait. Justice cannot be deferred. Action cannot be delayed. On this International Women’s Day, the courage and leadership of Myanmar’s women and girls must be matched with protection, accountability, meaningful inclusion and the sustained support required to uphold their rights.
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