In 1999, the Inter-agency Working Group on Reproductive Health in Crises, hereafter the IAWG, wrote the Minimum Initial Services Package, hereafter MISP, which is the second chapter in Reproductive Health in Refugee Situations: An Inter-agency Field Manual. The IAWG wrote MISP for governments and agencies, who respond to humanitarian crises, as a guide for the provision of reproductive health services at the beginning of a humanitarian crises. The goal of MISP was to outline the services that people in humanitarian crises are to receive to minimize injury and death from complications related to reproductive health, prevent and manage the consequences of sexual violence, and reduce the transmission of sexually transmitted infections, or STIs. MISP recognizes that reproductive health is a human right and applies to people in humanitarian crises, providing specific details for governments and agencies to follow and mitigate the adverse effects of reproductive health issues in vulnerable populations.

In October 2017, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health in New York City, New York, and the International Rescue Committee published A Toolkit for Integrating Menstrual Hygiene Management (MHM) into Humanitarian Response. Researchers Marni Sommer, Margaret Schmitt, and David Clatworthy collaborated on the Toolkit to benefit women and girls in Lebanon, Myanmar, and Tanzania. The Toolkit serves as a guideline for humanitarian organizations to ensure better menstrual hygiene management, or MHM, in low and middle-income countries. MHM includes clean water, private hygiene facilities for women and girls, materials such as sanitary pads, and accurate literature on menstruation. The authors of the Toolkit provide ways in which humanitarian organizations can work in communities to address social and physical barriers to managing menstrual health in low and middle-income countries.

In “Beyond Menstrual Hygiene: Addressing Vaginal Bleeding Throughout the Life Course in LMICs,” hereafter “Beyond Menstrual Hygiene,” Marni Sommer, Penelope A. Phillips-Howard, Therese Mahon, Sasha Zients, Meredith Jones, and Bethany A. Caruso explored the barriers women experience in managing menstruation and other forms of vaginal bleeding in low and middle-income countries, which the researchers abbreviate to LMICs. The medical journal British Medical Journal Global Health published the article on 27 July 2017. As little literature existed at the time concerning the topic of vaginal bleeding for women in LMICs, Sommer and her team state that they were motivated to assess the topic in order to better understand how issues concerning the health of women and girls are managed in limited-resource contexts. In “Beyond Menstrual Hygiene,” the authors assert that females in LMICs need access to better resources, education, and supplies to manage menstruation.