Saudi Arabia: The King Salman Humanitarian Aid and Relief Center has bolstered its work with a UN health agency to help cut the number of deaths among girls and pregnant women in Yemen.

Officials from KSrelief and the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) on Tuesday signed an agreement to provide reproductive health services for women in the war-torn country.

In a tweet, the center said: “The project goals include reducing deaths among girls and pregnant women in Yemen by providing free and high-quality medical services such as establishing reproductive health medical centers, equipping the centers with the necessary medical devices and supplies, providing free medicines to beneficiaries, and forming 50 medical teams to work in remote and rugged areas to record the cases and link them to the centers.”

The initiative was expected to benefit around 350,000 people directly and indirectly, the KSrelief statement added.

The UNFPA, with the Saudi aid agency’s support, has been operating the service since the beginning of 2020, funding maternity and health centers to help provide safe childbirth environments.

In October 2020, the KSrelief announced a contribution of $1.6 million to support joint work with the UNFPA in providing emergency gender-based violence services in Yemen.

At the time, Luay Shabaneh, then the UN agency’s regional director for Arab states, said: “We thank the KSrelief for this contribution, which will help UNFPA to provide essential gender-based violence services to women and girls in Yemen.”

According to the UNFPA, women and girls face entrenched gender inequalities in Yemen. Three-quarters of those displaced due to war were women and children, and females were most at risk of gender-based violence as the breakdown of protection systems made them vulnerable to abuse.

Since 2015, the partnership between the center and the UNFPA in Yemen has helped reach hundreds of thousands of women and girls with reproductive health and protection information and services.

Last year, the UNFPA said: “The partnership with the KSrelief has contributed to the improvement of the protection services provided to the most vulnerable women and girls in Yemen.