PRESS STATEMENT: ESSENTIAL, NOT OPTIONAL: STRENGTHENING HEALTH SYSTEMS TO UPHOLD HEALTH RIGHTS AND SEXUAL AND REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH AND JUSTICE IN TIMES OF POLYCRISIS

PRESS STATEMENT

For Immediate Release

ESSENTIAL, NOT OPTIONAL: STRENGTHENING HEALTH SYSTEMS TO UPHOLD HEALTH RIGHTS AND SEXUAL AND REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH AND JUSTICE IN TIMES OF POLYCRISIS.

Kampala, 02 June 2026,

Today, as the world confronts multiple and intersecting crises including commodity stockouts, economic injustice, climate emergencies, armed conflicts, shrinking civic space, anti-rights movements, rising gender-based violence, and devastating cuts to health and development financing we, women sex workers in our diversities of Uganda, stand united to declare that our health, our bodies, our dignity, and our lives are not optional.
Health systems that fail women, girls, women sex workers, sex workers using and injecting drugs, people living with HIV, persons with disabilities, gender expansive persons, refugees in our diversities are not merely weak, they are unjust. As women sex workers, we continue to live at the intersection of criminalization, patriarchy, poverty, stigma, violence, and systemic exclusion. We experience discrimination in health facilities, denial of services, breaches of confidentiality, police harassment, arbitrary arrests, economic exploitation, and exclusion from decision-making spaces that directly affect our lives and wellbeing.
The reality is clear: when crises emerge, the rights of the most marginalized women are often the first to be sacrificed and the last to be restored. Across Uganda, women sex workers continue to face significant barriers in accessing comprehensive sexual and reproductive health services, including contraception, HIV prevention and treatment, maternal health services, mental health support, safe abortion information and care, post-abortion care, and gender-based violence response services. These barriers are not accidental; they are the result of systems that have historically ignored the voices, experiences, and realities of those pushed to the margins.
We reject the narrative that sexual and reproductive health and rights are secondary concerns during such times of crisis. Sexual and reproductive health and justice are not luxuries, privileges, or optional services. They are fundamental human rights. A health system cannot claim to be resilient while marginalised women continue to die from preventable causes, while survivors of violence are denied support, while women are forced to carry unwanted pregnancies due to lack of access to services and information, while sex workers fear seeking healthcare because of stigma and criminalization, and while communities most affected by health inequities remain excluded from policy and resource allocation decisions.
We are deeply concerned by the global rollback of sexual and reproductive rights, declining donor funding, and shrinking investments in community-led health responses, all of which threaten decades of progress made by feminist movements, women’s rights organizations, and community-led grassroots networks. We refuse to accept a future where our health and rights are treated as expendable.
AWAC Uganda therefore calls upon our Government, the Government of Uganda, development partners, United Nations agencies, donors, civil society organizations, and health institutions to recognize that strengthening health systems requires far more than infrastructure, medicines, and medical supplies. It requires confronting the structural inequalities and injustices that deny women and marginalized communities’ access to health, dignity, bodily autonomy, and justice.
We demand the meaningful inclusion and leadership of women sex workers and other marginalized communities as experts, leaders, and decision-makers in the design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of health policies and programmes. We further call for universal access to comprehensive, affordable, stigma-free, and rights-based sexual and reproductive health services, including contraception, HIV services, maternal healthcare, safe abortion information and care within legal frameworks, post-abortion care, and mental health services.
We urge governments and development partners to increase and protect funding for community-led organizations, feminist movements, and sex worker-led initiatives. Community-led systems are not complementary interventions; they are essential pillars of resilient, responsive, and accountable health systems. We also call for the protection of bodily autonomy and reproductive justice, recognizing that every woman has the right to make informed decisions about her body, sexuality, fertility, and reproductive life free from coercion, violence, discrimination, criminalization, and stigma.
AWAC further calls for urgent action to address the harmful laws, policies, and practices that perpetuate violence, discrimination, and exclusion against women sex workers and other marginalized communities. We emphasize that health rights cannot be separated from economic justice. Poverty, hunger, homelessness, unemployment, and economic exclusion continue to undermine women’s ability to access healthcare, exercise bodily autonomy, and live with dignity. Strengthening health systems must therefore include investments in social protection, economic empowerment, and community resilience.
We also call for stronger accountability mechanisms to address discrimination, denial of services, abuse, and violations of health and human rights. Governments and health institutions must establish transparent, accessible, and survivor-centered systems that ensure justice and redress for those whose rights have been violated.
As women sex workers, we refuse to be invisible. We refuse to be spoken for. We refuse to be treated as passive beneficiaries of systems that continuously fail us. We are organizers, caregivers, workers, mothers, community leaders, and human rights defenders. We are experts in our own realities, and we are demanding health systems that recognize our humanity, uphold our rights, and center our voices.
In times of polycrisis, justice requires courage. Justice requires solidarity. Justice requires sustained investment in the communities led initiatives most affected by inequality and exclusion. Because our lives are essential. Because our health is essential. Because bodily autonomy is essential. Because sexual and reproductive health and justice are essential.
And because women sex workers are essential not optional.

For Media Inquiries:
Alliance of Women Advocating for Change (AWAC) Uganda
Email: info@awacuganda.org
Telephone: +256 775 603754
Website: https://awacuganda.org/