On this year’s commemoration of International Working Women’s Day, the Council for Health and Development and the Coalition for People’s Right to Health honors the courage, labor, and unyielding spirit of women across the globe–women who have stood firm against exploitation, fascism, colonial plunder, racism, and all forms of oppression. March 8 is not only a celebration of victories won through struggle, it is a reaffirmation of our collective commitment to continue fighting for genuine liberation for women and all toiling peoples.
We salute the women workers who endure the harshest conditions in factories, offices, and service industries, those who carry the world’s economy on their backs yet remain among the lowest paid. We stand with women farmers who till land they do not own, who feed the nation yet cannot afford the food they produce, and who resist land grabbing, destructive agro‑chemical industries, and militarization. We honor indigenous women who defend ancestral lands and cultures from imperialist destruction. We extend solidarity to migrant women forced abroad by poverty, environmental devastation, and neoliberal policies, and who now face racism, exploitation, and precarity in foreign lands. We recognize the women in health and care work, education, and public service—sectors consistently battered by austerity, privatization, and chronic underfunding—yet who continue to serve the people with dignity and compassion.
But even as we celebrate, we confront the grim reality that Filipino women continue to face deepening health inequalities. Women bear the brunt of inaccessible and unaffordable healthcare, unsafe working and living conditions, lack of reproductive health services, high maternal mortality, widespread malnutrition, and exposure to violence and displacement. Indigenous, rural, urban poor, and migrant women suffer the worst health outcomes due to systemic neglect and discrimination. These inequalities are not accidental—they are the direct result of neoliberal policies, privatization, and the subordination of our health system to foreign and corporate interests. The people’s right to health, including women’s right to health, remains systematically denied.
As imperialist powers escalate wars, plunder resources, and impose neoliberal dictates, governments including ours, divert public funds away from social services and into militarization, surveillance, and repression. This global system of exploitation pushes women into deeper poverty, trafficking, prostitution, and gender‑based violence. The same system fuels conflicts in Palestine, DR Congo, and many other regions, where women bear the heaviest toll yet continue to resist with extraordinary courage. Filipino women, too, face political repression, red‑tagging, and attacks for defending human rights and people’s welfare.
Today, we join the call of women worldwide: our common enemy is imperialism, which destroys our lands, plunders our resources, exploits our labor, and violates our bodies. On March 8, we march together to amplify the voices of women silenced by oppression, to reclaim our movements from institutions that dilute our struggle, and to advance a militant women’s movement committed to genuine social transformation.
We enjoin all Filipino people to resist imperialist impositions on health, especially the privatization of healthcare, and to demand a substantial increase in the national health budget to at least 5% of the Gross Domestic Product. We call for the removal of the 12% VAT on all medicines and assert our collective right to a free, comprehensive, and progressive national public health care system that truly serves the people.
Onward with the struggle for health, justice, and liberation! Long live the women of the world!#
Council for Health and Development (CHD) 