Inonge is the Operations Director for MSI Zambia. She oversees the outreach programme, where teams travel far distances into communities to provide reproductive healthcare. She shares how she fights for choice in this role. . .
“My beautiful home of Zambia is a vast landscape with rugged rural regions, where many live without the things you and I take for granted—like contraception. Women who want contraception often cannot access it.
Our teams travel into Zambia’s most rural and remote communities with the highest demand for contraception. And when our teams arrive, we offer people a range of contraceptive methods and a different future path—one that they choose.
It’s not uncommon to find 100 women from a community queueing for contraception in the morning. Some tell me how they walked tens of kilometres to get there; some passed through game parks, risking their lives against lions and elephants.
These women can sometimes be desperate to use contraception, saying they can’t afford to look after the children they already have.
In these moments, this is no longer ‘a job’. We are here to save their lives in every sense.
One in three of the people MSI supports with reproductive healthcare through our last-mile services is living in poverty, so giving them the choice to space pregnancies or avoid getting pregnant can be truly transformative.
One by one, we’re breaking cycles of poverty and opening opportunities for women’s and girls’ futures, giving them a chance to change the course and quality of their lives.
I’m so glad to be part of it.”