How much time passes before a woman—or her relatives—decide to seek care or emergency medical services during pregnancy? It often depends on how much they know about the services available.

This information may be hard to come by in conflict-affected areas, especially among internally displaced women. According to a retrospective study of health care during the 2006 war in Lebanon, 80 percent of Lebanese pregnant women before the war sought antenatal care, while the share of displaced women seeking care was only 34.5 percent.

Healthy Women, Healthy Economies is a global initiative that aims to unleash the “economic power of women by bringing governments, private sector, and other civil sector actors together to improve women’s health,” says Jocelyn Ulrich of EMD Serono (known as Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany outside of the US and Canada) in our Friday Podcast. Providing for women’s health needs enables them to “join, thrive, and rise” in the economy, “bringing prosperity home to their families and communities.”

In 1971, the wives of textile workers in Ahmedabad, western India, became the main earners in their families overnight, after several large textile mills closed down. They were part of the 94 percent of India’s female labor force working in the informal sector—recycling waste, embroidering fabric, and selling vegetables—and thus they remained largely invisible to the government and to formal labor unions. In response, Ela Bhatt, a young lawyer, met with 100 of the women in a public park to establish the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), which would later register as a trade union and swell to the two million members it boasts today.

“This is a woman who did exactly what she was supposed to do; she did exactly what we encourage pregnant women to do,” said Amy Dempsey of the Population Council at a recent Wilson Center event on World Preeclampsia Day. The Ethiopian woman was suffering from preeclampsia—a preventable condition—but like many pregnant women in low- and middle-income countries, she did not receive the treatment needed to stop it. “Pregnancy was the first time she had ever stepped foot in a health facility,” said Dempsey.