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Santa Barbara residents understand that power outages can be more than inconveniences. In recent years, our community has lived through wildfires, debris flows, severe storms, and public safety power shutoffs that disrupted daily life and, at times, placed lives at risk. Those experiences offer a glimpse into a reality faced far more frequently in many parts of the world, where unreliable electricity can jeopardize access to healthcare every day.
Picture a woman in labor in the dark. A midwife trying to safely deliver a baby using only the light from a cell phone. An obstetrician struggling to continue care during an outage. A rural clinic unable to power an ultrasound machine, refrigerate medicines, or provide oxygen to patients when electricity fails.
For women and girls, reliable light and electricity can mean the difference between danger and safety, isolation and connection.
This May, during Women’s Health Month and ahead of the International Day of Action for Women’s Health on May 28, we must recognize that reliable electricity is essential to safe, dignified, and equitable healthcare for women and girls everywhere.
This year’s International Day of Action theme — “Essential, Not Optional” — calls attention to strengthening health systems and ensuring access to essential healthcare services during overlapping global crises. Reliable energy belongs squarely within that conversation.
Supporting mothers and babies in Bangladesh in Dec. 2025. (Photo by Unite to Light)
At last week’s Illuminating Impact Symposium in Santa Barbara, we discussed how energy access shapes women’s health across the lifespan, from adolescence to pregnancy, childbirth, caregiving, and aging.
Electricity powers vaccine and medicine refrigeration, oxygen systems, diagnostics, emergency response, communications, and lifesaving medical devices. A clinic without reliable electricity cannot consistently provide maternal care, nighttime emergency services, or critical diagnostic tools like ultrasound machines.
But the connection between energy and women’s health goes beyond clinical care.
Reliable light affects safety, privacy, communication, and mental well-being. It shapes whether women feel safe traveling at night, whether a mother can contact help during an emergency, and whether patients feel secure enough to seek care in the first place.
Across every stage of life, access to reliable energy influences health outcomes and opportunity. Menstrual hygiene management depends on safe, private, well-lit environments. Safe maternal care and women’s health services require dependable electricity and functioning healthcare facilities. Childbirth becomes more dangerous when clinics lose electricity. Women and families are often especially affected when healthcare, communications, and household systems are disrupted during disasters and outages.
Fortunately, solutions already exist — from portable lighting devices to resilient healthcare infrastructure. And our Santa Barbara-based nonprofits are leading the way.
For years, Unite to Light has provided portable solar lights and charging solutions that improve safety, communication, and educational access for vulnerable communities around the world. Unite to Light often says that “light can save a life and bring life into this world safely.” Their Luke Lights, Haven Lanterns, and Chandler Chargers help students study after dark, allow families to charge phones during outages, and equip midwives and frontline healthcare workers with reliable solar-powered light and energy.
In Bangladesh, Unite to Light has partnered with the United Nations’ midwives and maternal healthcare workers serving Rohingya refugee communities, where portable solar lights help providers safely care for mothers and newborns during nighttime births and emergencies when electricity is unavailable or unreliable.
Direct Relief distributes Unite to Light products during disasters and includes lighting and charging devices in emergency response kits supporting communities affected by outages and crises.
In early 2025, an off-grid rural hospital in Greenville, Liberia, had nighttime lighting for the first time due to a Direct Relief grant-funded solar microgrid. (Direct Relief photo)
As part of a broader commitment to supporting healthcare partners with clean, resilient power, Direct Relief has supported projects in settings where reliable electricity strengthens care for women and families. In Palawan, Philippines, a fully solar-powered birthing facility recently added an ultrasound machine to expand prenatal care services. In Yemen, resilient solar energy systems support hospitals providing emergency obstetric and newborn care. In Hawai‘i and Mexico City, solar-and-battery-powered mobile health units help bring maternal healthcare and breast cancer screening directly to underserved communities.
Direct Relief also supports midwives, emergency health facilities, and frontline providers caring for women and families in humanitarian and resource-constrained settings.
Reliable power does more than keep the lights on. It makes care safer, more consistent, and more dignified.
At a time when communities around the world are navigating climate disruptions, conflict, strained health systems, and growing uncertainty, investments in resilient energy can provide something both practical and hopeful: continuity, connection, and care where and when it matters most.
This Women’s Health Month, and on the International Day of Action for Women’s Health, we encourage readers not only to learn more about this work, but to support it. Support efforts to ensure that frontline healthcare workers, midwives, nurses, and clinics around the world have the tools and resilient energy systems they need to care for women and families safely and consistently.
When communities have reliable power and light, healthcare systems can help deliver safer births, healthier families, and brighter futures.
