Strengthening locally led research to respond to the sexual and reproductive health and rights of migrants from Venezuela and Central America

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 IGO License, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. No modifications or commercial use of this article are permitted. In any reproduction of this article there should not be any suggestion that PAHO or this article endorse any specific organization or products. The use of the PAHO logo is not permitted. This notice should be preserved along with the article’s original URL. Open access logo and text by PLoS, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. In 2018, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) established mass migration as a priority health issue in national, sub-regional, and regional agendas (1). In recent years, two simultaneous mass migratory phenomena in the Americas are occurring as people from Central American countries and Venezuela migrate to other countries in the Region. As of December 2022, approximately 7.13 million Venezuelan refugees and migrants had left their country, with 5.99 million relocating to other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean (2). Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador bear the heaviest burden of migration, with over 4.47 million migrants from Venezuela currently being hosted in those countries. The United Nations Refugee Agency has called this “the largest displacement of people in the history of Latin America” with Venezuelan migration second only to Syria (3). By late 2020, there were an estimated 715 000 refugees and asylum seekers globally from Central America and Mexico en route to the United States and Canada; there has been a sharp increase since January 2022 which is estimated could result in half a million migrants requiring humanitarian assistance (4,5). Most of the refugees and asylum seekers from the Region were from three countries in particular: Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, also known as the Northern Triangle, with a notable increase of individuals from Nicaragua, as well as from Cuba, Haiti, and Venezuela (4,5). According to Doctors Without Borders, about half a million people flee violence and poverty from Central America towards North America each year (6). Sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) are integral to health and ensuring access to sexual and reproductive health services among migrants remains an important public health priority (7). There is evidence suggesting that migrants may have limited access to sexual and reproductive health services and may face specific threats to their SRHR (8–10). Sex and gender-defined roles impact the experience of migrants and refugees everywhere; women and girls are significantly affected in both sudden and slow-onset humanitarian crises and face multiple SRHR challenges, as do lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex persons (LGBTQI+) and sexual minorities (11–13). These challenges are often associated with increased exposure to sexual and gender-based violence, increased rates of complications during pregnancy and post-pregnancy, complications due to unsafe abortions, and increased rates and suboptimal management of sexually transmitted infections and HIV/AIDS, among others (9–11). The mass migration observed in Latin America has added pressure on the health systems of countries receiving these sudden influxes of people in a short timeframe (14). The need for context-specific and locally led evidence generation on issues related to health and mass migration has become paramount. This is particularly relevant for migrants’ SRHR, risks of infectious diseases, and with regards to the health system capacity to address their needs.