By Brandon Lawler | Annual Fund Associate
“I want people to know that they have the freedom to make their own choices about their bodies and their health.”
Martine Naigna has spent the last 15 years working as a midwife in Chad’s toughest humanitarian settings to help meet the sexual and reproductive health needs of women and girls, who are often the most marginalized and least served by the health system in times of crisis.
Now a health systems advisor with Ipas in Chad, Naigna has built her career in a landscape where abortion is legally restricted and where patriarchal norms and systemic barriers have historically cost women their lives. Her advocacy was born of a singular, mounting frustration: witnessing preventable and needless maternal and child deaths because women lacked the autonomy to make decisions about their own bodies.
Confronting opposition from religious and community leaders
Early in Naigna’s career, while working at a refugee camp, she faced opposition from religious and community leaders who demanded that women seeking reproductive health care needed their husbands’ approval.
She paid the price for her unflinching commitment to women’s bodily autonomy when she was arrested for giving a woman contraception without her husband’s consent (he then filed a complaint).
Driving change one community at a time
Undeterred by the incident, Naigna continued her community advocacy.
“We met imams during Friday prayers,” she says. “Women can’t step into mosques, so we’d wait outside until they were done with prayers and speak to them. That’s how we ignited attitude changes at the community level.”
She and her colleagues witnessed tangible results. In the refugee camps where husbands dictated health care access a decade ago, women now seek family planning freely.
Ipas’s role in advocacy
Naigna wants adolescent girls and women to know their rights. She joined Ipas as health systems advisor in 2025 and has been instrumental in our training and advocacy efforts.
The work focuses on serving marginalized and hard-to-reach populations with high-quality reproductive health services and preventing death and injury from unsafe abortion. The program is a part of a broader effort to change harmful social and gender norms that hinder access to sexual and reproductive health services.
Naigna’s teammate, Sonia Adama Kodouroum, says the organization is filling a critical gap by documenting maternal deaths related to unsafe abortion and closely spaced pregnancies. Chad has one of the lowest contraceptive rates in the world, at 5%, and the second-highest maternal mortality rate, at 800 deaths per 100,000 live births.
“I want people in my local community to know that this freedom to choose exists, and that it’s necessary especially in cases of unplanned pregnancies where people feel the need to hide and procure unsafe abortions, which leads to deaths,” says Naigna. “I want people to know that they have the freedom to make their own choices about their bodies and their health.”
By Ciara Corcoran | Individual & Major Gifts
By Anthonia Emordi & Habygaelle Muzie | Annual Fund Associate & Comms Advisior, Ipas DRC
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