Youterus Health

07/08/2026

07/07/2026

We are hiring two Fellows for the Youterus Fellowship 2026 cohort.

The Fellowship is a hands-on placement inside Africa's first uterine health company. You own real work that ships with your name on it, receive weekly one-to-one coaching from your host, and earn a monthly stipend.

The two roles we are currently hiring for:

Office of the CEO Fellow · South Africa, remote

Work at the centre of the company. You will support the Chief of Staff in keeping the Office of the CEO running: managing schedules and travel, preparing meeting summaries, maintaining trackers and systems, and pulling together inputs for key organisational reports. You will see how decisions get made and help make them happen. Sharp organisation and impeccable English are a must.

Creative Campaigns Fellow · Freetown, Sierra Leone

Bring our campaigns to life. You will design presentations, posters, social media graphics, and branded assets, help plan campaigns, schedule and publish content across our channels, and keep everything on brand and on time. You will work side by side with the Creative and Campaigns Lead and see your designs reach real audiences. A strong eye for design and impeccable English are a must.

Application deadline: 20 July 2026.

Full position descriptions and the application form: youterushealth.com/careers

Early, accessible, dignified care for every woman. Unmute the Womb.

30/06/2026

We are proud to share that we have completed 1,000 WOMB Index screenings across six districts of Sierra Leone. The first time uterine health has been measured this way anywhere on the continent.

Over twelve weeks, our Health Navigators sat with women in their own communities and listened across eight dimensions of uterine health, from pain and symptom burden to affordability, dignity, and agency. The women who raised the most urgent flags did not simply receive a referral and a goodbye. They moved through a real pathway, from community screening to ultrasound to confirmed diagnosis, and where it was needed, to surgery funded through our Uterine Health Fund.

In a country where fibroids fill close to a third of gynaecological admissions, and a diagnosis can take nearly three years to arrive, these 1,000 conversations become something rare: the first community-generated dataset on uterine health ever built in Sierra Leone.

To our Health Navigators, our clinical teams, funders, and most of all the women who chose to speak, thank you for building this with us.

Unmute the Womb.

22/06/2026

Hickmatu’s story moves through almost everything women are told to keep quiet about. A girl cut at eleven and told it was a holiday. A college pregnancy nobody had prepared her to recognise. An abortion that left her empty. Morning-after pills sold to her fifteen times over, with no warning, while her cycle quietly fell apart. Years of silence with her own womb.

What stays with us is what she said near the end:

"We don't talk about our bodies with our mothers or sisters. We don't dare. But look how good it feels to share these stories. Other women need this too. They just can't get it yet."

That silence is generational and clinical.

Hickmatu's body carried the cost of that silence long before she had language for it. Now she is turning her camera toward what comes next: the women, the wombs, the mental journey of first-time mothers without enough support.

Her story is not rare. It is just rarely told.

18/06/2026

Our founder, Dr. Fatou Wurie DrPH, FAPH is joining the Fearless community for an Ask-Me-Anything session on Tuesday, 23 June.

Fearless brings together women of the global majority who lead social impact work across 24 countries. Fatou will sit down with them for an open conversation about building Youterus Health, Africa's uterine health company, and what it takes to build the standards uterine health has never had, across several countries at the same time.

This will be a candid conversation on how her own 23 undiagnosed years shaped the way she leads, what it takes to hold clinical care, financing, policy and storytelling together rather than choosing one, what she has had to set down to do it, and what building a team on heart and trust as much as technical skill asks of a founder.

https://lnkd.in/emJRejmi

12/06/2026

Up to 80% of women of African descent will develop uterine fibroids.

In Sierra Leone, they account for a third of all gynaecological admissions at the national referral hospital. And yet they appear in no national policy, no dedicated budget line, no dataset. A condition this common, made this invisible.
That silence has a cost: paid by women in delayed diagnosis, in stigma, and in surgery that can swallow months of a household's income, with no insurance and no subsidy to soften it.

The month of June Dr. Fatou Wurie is taking the research that finally names that cost to universities across Sierra Leone.
Her lecture, Naming the Wound, Rewriting the Record, draws on her Harvard doctoral work, grounded in the lives and courage of Sierra Leonean women, to ask how a health system comes to overlook the suffering of so many, and what it takes to build one that sees them.

We're bringing it to the people who will shape that future: students, future clinicians, and the next generation of health leaders.

Tour stops:
📌 24 June : Eastern Technical University, Kenema
📌 25 June : Njala University, School of Community Health & Clinical Sciences, Bo

See you there!

29/05/2026

This week, our Founder and Chief Steward, Dr. Fatou Wurie, was at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center in Italy, sitting alongside a small group of community leaders, policymakers, health workers, and partners convened by VillageReach.

The shared question was a hard one. As Africa's health financing landscape shifts under our feet, whose voices actually shape what gets built next?

The conversation came at a moment when global health financing is being rewritten in real time. The Lusaka Agenda. The Accra Reset. Donor exits. Shrinking aid. New frameworks being drafted in capitals far from the women and girls they will eventually touch. The question of whose voice carries weight in these moments is not academic. It decides who lives well, who suffers quietly, and who never gets counted at all.

Dr. Wurie carried into that room what Youterus stands on. That uterine health is not a niche concern. She shared the tools we are building to measure the true state of uterine health across the continent, and the framework we use to name what so many African women carry silently across their lifetimes. Pain that goes unspoken, conditions that go undiagnosed, decisions made about bodies without the people inside them.

We are grateful for the four days, the company kept, and the questions asked.

# RockefellerFoundation

28/05/2026

We asked women what they were told about their period before they got it.

Watch what they said and then think about what you were told.

For most of us, the first conversation about our period was barely a conversation at all. A whisper from a mother. A warning from an aunt. A pad was handed to us in silence or nothing at all. Just blood one day and the expectation to figure it out alone.

And that first conversation, or the absence of one, set the tone for everything that followed. Because if you cannot talk about your period openly, you cannot ask: is this amount of bleeding normal? If you were taught to endure pain quietly, how would you ever know that the cramps keeping you in bed are not just "bad luck" but could be a sign of endometriosis, fibroids, or adenomyosis?

That silence is not just uncomfortable; it is dangerous.

When we cannot talk about our periods, we cannot tell the difference between what is normal and what needs medical attention. We cannot catch heavy menstrual bleeding early, before it leads to chronic anaemia. We cannot recognise the symptoms of conditions that affect millions of women but take years, sometimes over a decade, to diagnose. We lose the chance to act early, when it matters most.

This is why open conversations about menstrual health are not a nice-to-have. They are healthcare. They are the first screening tool any woman has: her own understanding of her body.

A woman needs honest information before she gets her period, so she is not afraid.
She needs it during, so she can recognise when something changes.
And she needs it throughout her life, because her body will keep changing and she deserves to understand why.

So today, on Menstrual Health Day, talk about your period. Out loud. To your daughter, your sister, your friend, your colleague. Not in a whisper. Not as a warning. As information. As care. As something she deserves to understand about her own body.

21/05/2026

A girl's first period is the earliest point at which a health system can prove itself useful to her. Most are not designed to meet her there.
The adolescent health agenda is built around HIV, early pregnancy, and gender-based violence, not around the moment she first bleeds and learns from the world around her whether her body is information or shame.

At the World Health Summit Regional Meeting in Nairobi, our Founder and Chief Steward, Dr. Fatou Wurie, argued that the issues on the adolescent health agenda are not three crises sitting beside each other. In her words: "What we are really describing is one crisis running through the same body, in the same community, at the same time, repeating itself across the continent and across generations."

The point she returned to was menstruation.

Not access to pads.
Not the supply chain for sanitary products.
The experience itself.

This is the part of the conversation that gets lost. Programmes addressing HIV, gender-based violence, and reproductive health continue to sit in separate corridors of the health system, when the body of the girl they are designed for is moving through all of them at once. And the threats she faces rarely come from strangers. The violence she experiences is often inside relationships she has been taught to trust.
Power is what holds this arrangement in place. It decides who learns what, when, and from whom. What is described as a funding gap or a policy gap is the visible shape of that arrangement. It is not its cause.

Meaningful change comes when young people's lived realities sit at the centre of how the system is designed from the start. It means a girl learning that pain is information, not shame. It means her first period being met with knowledge, not silence. It means uterine health entering the conversation at twelve, not at thirty-two when she is already in pain.

This is the work Youterus is built for. Uterine health, governed in Africa, that starts with her first period and follows her across her life.