As a result, it is easier for them to fall into poverty or be in extreme poverty. Women living in poverty don't get the necessary preventative care that would prevent many diseases that can be avoided. Extreme poverty is also an environment in which health risks are more pronounced. There are usually issues of unsafe drinking water, sanitation, risky sexual threats for married or unmarried women, and malnutrition. Poverty exacerbates these health risks because of prolonged non treatment of medical issues caused from an unsafe living situation. There is essentially a chain effect of different things as to why women don't receive the proper medical care. Factors that contribute to this poverty and by extension access to healthcare is gender-based biases, exposure to harmful practices like female genital mutilation, political and policy changes.
Government agencies and the structural changes they make, play a part in women not having access to proper healthcare. The International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization and the World Bank set the international economic order as well as international policy making. In her article about structural adjustment and trade liberalization, Mariama Williams writes, "IMF programs and policies since the emergence of the external debt crisis of the 1970s can be summed up into words: "contain" and "secure." As a result, the SAPs implemented by both the Bank and the Fund have straitjacketed governments, blocking their ability to provide meaningful social welfare programs to meet the needs of the most vulnerable in society. To a certain extent SAPs have a led not only to government's inability to protect, promote and fulfill social and economic rights but may themselves violates these rights." (Williams 2). With structural adjustment programs concentrating on dead reduction, social programs, mostly healthcare, have been underfunded or cut it all together.
