Yemen health ministry presses UNFPA and Yamaan Foundation for lasting reproductive health services

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Yemen’s Ministry of Public Health and Population has opened a fresh round of talks with two of its most important partners in reproductive health care, as the country’s aid-dependent health system braces for another year of shrinking international funding. Assistant Undersecretary of the ministry Dr. Abdulraqeeb al-Haidari held separate meetings in the interim capital Aden on Sunday with the protection team of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and with the Yamaan Foundation, the Yemeni organisation that manages the country’s maternal health voucher scheme, the state news agency Saba reported.

In the meeting with UNFPA, al-Haidari focused on tightening coordination between the ministry and the fund, and on clarifying where the health sector sits within Yemen’s wider protection system. The two sides went over referral mechanisms and joint assessments — the machinery that decides whether a woman who reaches a rural health unit with obstetric complications is moved on to a hospital equipped to treat her. He argued for an integrated national health response rather than a patchwork of separately managed interventions.

His central message concerned the shape of the partnership rather than its size. He pressed for a gradual shift away from support aimed at individual projects and towards national systems able to keep services running on their own. That reflects a long-standing frustration in Aden: project funding arrives with fixed start and end dates, and when a grant closes the clinic it paid for often closes with it.

The second meeting, with Dr. Mohammed al-Hamid, representative of the Yamaan Foundation, dealt with the specifics of reproductive health delivery. The two men reviewed joint programmes including the health voucher scheme, plans to upgrade facilities, and training for midwives and in emergency obstetric care. Al-Haidari said such programmes need to be aligned with the health sector’s stated priorities and with what facilities actually lack, rather than designed around what is easiest to fund.

Yamaan, formally the Yamaan Foundation for Health and Social Development, was launched in 2010 and acts as the voucher management agency for maternal health services, contracting a mix of providers that ranges from referral hospitals down to independent community midwives. The voucher model is a demand-side approach: instead of financing a facility directly, it subsidises the patient, who can then choose among contracted providers. Published evaluations found that uptake in one Yemeni governorate ran well above projections, and that vouchers kept women reaching maternal and newborn care in 2014 even as public facilities struggled to stay open.

The timing of Sunday’s talks is not incidental. Four days earlier, Saba reported that al-Haidari had met the UNFPA team in Aden specifically to discuss how basic health services could be sustained given the expected effects of a restructuring of the fund’s support to some health facilities. Those talks, the agency said at the time, were aimed at ensuring continuity of services.

That restructuring sits inside a much larger contraction. UNFPA has said sweeping reductions in humanitarian financing forced it to withdraw support from health facilities and from 14 mobile teams that had been reaching women in some of Yemen’s most remote areas. The agency has put the number of health workers who lost their jobs at close to 1,500, and has warned that around two million women and girls could lose access to essential services across 2025 and 2026. For 2026 it appealed for one billion dollars for crisis settings worldwide, with half of that earmarked for five emergencies, Yemen among them.

The gap those cuts open is difficult to fill locally. UNFPA is the sole supplier of life-saving reproductive health medicines in Yemen and coordinates reproductive health and protection services nationwide. Roughly five million women of childbearing age face obstacles reaching those services, with the difficulty sharpest in rural districts and near front lines.

The underlying condition of the health system explains why officials in Aden now talk about capacity rather than aid volumes. Fewer than 60 per cent of Yemen’s health facilities are fully functional, and among those still operating only about one in five can provide maternal and child health services. Humanitarian assessments for 2026 put the number of pregnant women needing life-saving care at roughly 662,000, of whom about 340,000 need emergency obstetric care. An estimated 1.3 million pregnant and breastfeeding women are acutely malnourished.

More than 22 million people in Yemen, including about 10.95 million women and girls, are expected to need humanitarian assistance and protection during 2026, according to the humanitarian needs and response plan published in March. Aid agencies have set a target of reaching 12 million of them, with 9.4 million prioritised by severity of need — an acknowledgement that the response is being rationed.

More than a decade of war has left the health system fragmented, with authority split between the internationally recognised government based in Aden and the Houthi authorities in Sanaa, and with recurrent outbreaks of cholera and measles adding to the routine burden carried by clinics. Salaries, fuel for generators and cold-chain equipment for vaccines all depend heavily on external financing.

Neither meeting produced announced commitments, and the ministry released no figures for the programmes under discussion. What the two sessions signal is the direction Aden wants the conversation to take as funding tightens: fewer standalone projects, and more investment in referral systems, trained midwives and facilities capable of working on after a grant cycle ends. Whether donors have the money to follow is a separate question.