On World Humanitarian Day, Community Partners International (CPI) is mobilizing to support communities in Mon State, Myanmar, affected by severe flooding. Between August 16 and 18, CPI staff traveled with members of the Bo Bo Win Emergency Rescue Foundation from the Myanmar Health CSO Network (Mon State) to five flooded villages Kyaikmaraw Township to distribute packs of rice to 625 households. CPI also distributed water purification tablets and instruction pamphlets provided by the Mon State Health Department.

Ma Hnin, 26, lives in South Dagon township, a suburb to the northeast of Yangon, Myanmar's commercial capital. Ma Hnin’s family moved to South Dagon six years ago from a village further east. “It is easier to earn money in Yangon. That’s why my family moved here,” she says. Ma Hnin lives together with her parents, husband and two children - a three-year-old daughter and three-month-old son. Her husband and father both work for a local saw mill. Just over three years ago, when she was pregnant with her first child, Ma Hnin found out that she was hepatitis B positive.

Renewed tensions and conflict in Kachin State, Myanmar, have created a humanitarian emergency with nearly 100,000 people forcibly displaced into more than 130 displacement sites across the state. It is crucial that these displaced communities have access to basic health care and nutrition services to help them survive during these precarious times. 

Many women in remote and conflict-affected communities of Kachin State, Myanmar, lack access to reliable and comprehensive birth control options. Until recently in Myanmar, injectable hormonal birth control could only be provided by midwives. However, most communities in Kachin State do not have regular access to midwife services. In an important recent development, the Myanmar Ministry of Health and Sports (MoHS) introduced new guidelines allowing auxiliary midwives (AMWs) to administer a self-injectable hormonal birth control option (known as DMPA-SC), once they have been sufficiently trained. As the AMW network can reach more remote communities, this change has the potential to transform access to reliable and comprehensive birth control for many thousands of women of reproductive age in Kachin State and across Myanmar.