The Covid-19 pandemic confronted Mongolian women with unprecedented social and economic challenges. School closures drastically increased their domestic care burden, even as rates of domestic violence spiked.

A group of psychologists worked for the public good, to offer these services to women entrepreneurs in the capital city of Ulaanbaatar and the largely rural provinces of Gobi-Altai, Umnogobi, and Uvurkhangai.

When the Asia Foundation–Mongolia  first launched the project, in September 2021, the average number of incoming calls to the telephone hotline was just 23 per month, and the callers were overwhelmingly concentrated in the capital city, despite our efforts to reach clients in rural locations. With targeted outreach efforts through a mass text-message campaign, however, the number of calls increased by nearly 50 percent, and 40 percent of all calls were from rural areas. By the end of the project, in September 2022, the total number of incoming calls to the hotline had reached 436, and 101 clients had received appointments with psychologists for ongoing therapy.