WFF: Healing Women with Prolapse in Ethiopia

WFF’s newest program launched in 2016 trains Urogynecologists in Ethiopia at Mekelle University, the first program of its kind in the country.

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Worldwide Fistula Fund (WFF) is a nonprofit global health organization helping girls and women with obstetric fistulas to heal, build new lives and rejoin the communities that once shunned them.

An obstetric fistula is a devastating childbirth injury sustained during prolonged, obstructed labor when a baby cannot fit through the mother’s birth canal. Pressure from obstructed labor destroys the tissue normally separating a mother’s vagina from her bladder or rectum, leaving a hole with continuous, uncontrollable leakage of urine or feces. A woman needs surgery to heal from an obstetric fistula.

Typically, women with fistulas are rejected by their husbands and communities. They live in isolation.

Working with local partners in sub-Saharan Africa, WFF provides girls and women surgical care, rehabilitation, literacy & vocational classes, and trains African doctors in fistula prevention & treatment. Founded in 1995, WFF is the oldest organization in the United States focused on obstetric fistula.