“One of the first victims of war is the health care system itself,” said Marco Baldan, the chief war surgeon for the International Committee of the Red Cross. Violence directed at health facilities and workers is common in conflict, despite international laws protecting medical personnel, facilities, and transport vehicles during war.

“A lot of the advocacy of family planning has been built around establishing a long list of the many ways in which family planning can be relevant” to other development goals, says Parfait Eloundou-Enyegue of Cornell University in our latest Friday Podcast. While comprehensive accounts of the ways family planning access benefits communities, these “laundry lists” are not “clear, synthetic, or integrative,” he says.

Africare’s work has been built on a “strong belief that community mobilization and local capacity building and innovation are the cornerstones of successful development, and that, for us, includes resilience,” says Franklin Moore, Chief of Programs for Africare, in a podcast from a recent Wilson Center event. “Community engagement, capacity building, and looking at locally driven behavior and social change is what empowers communities.”

According to a raft of experts, empowering women to be economic actors would change quite a bit. The UN Secretary General set up a High-Level Panel on it; Melinda Gates keeps talking about it; and the World Bank and Ivanka Trump recently launched an initiative to unlock billions in financing for it. Targets related to women’s economic empowerment cut across multiple Sustainable Development Goals, including advancing equal rights to economic resources, doubling the agricultural productivity and incomes of women who are small-scale farmers, and achieving full and productive employment and decent work for all women.