840,000+
1,500+
1,300+
2010
Our Partner
Built in Uganda. Led by Ugandans.
TERREWODE was founded by Ugandan leader Alice Emasu with a vision that women living with fistula deserved more than an operation. They deserved care shaped by people who understood their communities, their challenges, and what it would take to truly come home again.
Local leadership · Eastern Uganda
A local vision begins to grow.
Our partnership with TERREWODE began in 2010, supporting Alice Emasu's early work on national fistula strategies in Uganda.
From the beginning, the vision was bigger than treating a single injury. It was about building care around women, strengthening local leadership, and creating something that could continue growing from within the community itself.
The Terrewode Women's Community Hospital opens in Soroti.
In 2019, years of partnership and local leadership culminated in Uganda's first hospital dedicated to fistula and childbirth injury care.
As Terrewode Women's Fund, we were proud to play a pivotal role in helping TERREWODE bring this vision to life. The hospital was built around a simple idea: women deserve more than an operation. They deserve care that addresses everything they need to heal and return home with dignity.
TERREWODE Women's Community Hospital · Soroti
Comprehensive treatment · Uganda
Treat the injury. Care for the whole woman.
A successful operation can close a fistula, but recovery doesn't end when a woman leaves the operating room.
At TERREWODE Women's Community Hospital, physical therapy is part of routine care. Women also receive counseling, meals, transportation to and from the hospital, and support for the journey home.
Since the hospital opened, more than 1,800 women and girls have received comprehensive treatment and rehabilitation for fistula and other childbirth injuries.
Survivors aren't the end of the story.
Across Uganda, survivor-led Solidarity Groups bring women together after treatment and turn recovery into collective strength.
The groups create community, reduce isolation, support economic independence, and give women a voice in the systems that shape maternal health.
Women who once lived with the stigma of fistula become business owners, advocates, educators, and leaders helping the next woman find care.
Recovery, community and connection · Uganda
Building safer maternal care · Eastern Uganda
What if the next woman never developed fistula at all?
Nearly every obstetric fistula can be prevented when women have timely access to skilled maternity and emergency obstetric care.
TERREWODE is building on years of treatment, reintegration, and survivor support to address the conditions that allow fistula to happen in the first place.
Terrewode Maternity will expand access to high-quality maternity care in Eastern Uganda, with a focus on safe delivery, prevention, and respectful treatment.
From healing one woman to protecting the next.
Every woman who receives treatment changes one life. Every survivor who becomes an advocate reaches another.
Every stronger clinic, trained provider, informed community, and safer birth moves Uganda closer to a future where fistula disappears.
Lasting change grows woman by woman, community by community, generation by generation.
Women supporting women · Uganda
What began by strengthening locally led fistula care has grown into a network of treatment, recovery, survivor leadership, economic opportunity, and prevention.
Support This WorkThe TERREWODE Model
Recovery that reaches far beyond the hospital.
Fistula is a physical injury, but healing rarely ends with surgery.
A woman may arrive needing treatment. She may also need physical therapy, counseling, transportation, help rebuilding an income, or simply a community that understands what she has survived.
Terrewode brings those pieces together so women can move from injury toward recovery, independence, and leadership.
TERREWODE Women’s Community Hospital
A hospital built around the whole woman.
When Terrewode Women’s Community Hospital opened in Soroti in 2019, it created more than a place for fistula surgery.
It created a place where treatment, physical rehabilitation, counseling, meals, transportation, and the first steps toward reintegration could happen as part of one continuum of care.
Women aren’t treated as a diagnosis or a procedure. They are supported as they heal physically, prepare to return home, rebuild relationships, and begin imagining life beyond fistula.
Since opening, the hospital has provided comprehensive treatment and rehabilitation to more than 1,800 women and girls living with fistula and other childbirth injuries.
What’s Next
What if fewer women ever needed fistula treatment?
Years of treating fistula have made one thing unmistakably clear: nearly every case represents a childbirth injury that could have been prevented with timely access to skilled maternity and emergency obstetric care.
Terrewode Maternity builds on everything Terrewode has learned from women who survived those gaps in care. The goal is to expand access to high quality, respectful maternity services in Eastern Uganda so complications can be recognized earlier, dangerous labor can be treated sooner, and more mothers can give birth safely.
The vision is no longer only to repair the injury after it happens. It’s to help build a maternal health system where it happens less and less.
Stories of health and hope.
Behind every statistic is a woman, a family, and a story of resilience.
Betty’s Story: A New Life After Obstetric Fistula
After two days of obstructed labor, Betty Nalule survived an emergency cesarean birth and welcomed her daughter, Favour. But she left the hospital with obstetric fistula…
Read the Story
From loss to survival to dream job
After a ruptured uterus, the loss of her baby, and obstetric fistula changed the course of her life, Irene found treatment and support through TERREWODE. Years…
Read the Story
Overcoming Obstetric Fistula and Rebuilding Her Life
After enduring severe delays during labor that resulted in the loss of her baby and an obstetric fistula, Aisha was abandoned by her husband. She eventually…
Read the Story
After Loss, Isolation, and Fistula, Maria Found Her Way Back to Care
Maria spent days trying to reach emergency obstetric care, only to arrive after her baby had died. After developing obstetric fistula, she was shunned by her…
Read the Story
After 10 Years of Living With a Childbirth Injury, Faisy Found Hope
For nearly a decade, Faisy lived with the effects of a severe perineal tear sustained during the birth of her first child. In 2025, a chance…
Read the Story
Agnes’s Journey of Healing
After a prolonged labor, a ruptured uterus, and the loss of her baby, Agnes developed obstetric fistula and lost movement in one leg. At TERREWODE Women’s…
Read the StoryFive Countries · One Mission
The work continues across the map.
Meet the other locally led partners working to end fistula community by community.
