Saving Women’s Lives Recurring Theme at International Meetings

Millions of Women Facing Unmet Needs and Unfufilled Rights

April 12 - Saving women lives and advancing basic human rights for women have emerged as powerful and recurring themes at a series of major international meetings held in recent days.

Commission on Population and Development

At the just concluded meeting of the UN’s Commission on Population and Development, shortcomings in ensuring reproductive health and rights for women everywhere were highlighted. According to the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), 120 million women want to plan their families but lack access to the information and services needed to do so. Fifty-two million women in Asia, Africa and Latin America deliver their babies without a birth attendant (doctor, nurse or midwife). As a result, one woman dies during childbirth every minute.

In an opening speech to the Commission, UNFPA Executive Director Thoraya Obaid said that “what we are talking about here is ensuring that people can protect their health, their lives and their futures.” Obaid alerted the delegates to impending shortfalls of reproductive health supplies as a result of growing demand and the spreading HIV/AIDS pandemic. “We predict that the funding required for contraceptives for family planning and condoms to prevent HIV/AIDS will double in the next 15 years to $1.8 billion. Despite this growing need, donor support for contraceptives is at its lowest level in five years,” Obaid said.

Delegates to the Commission examined global efforts to implement the Programme of Action agreed at the historic 1994 International Conference on Population and Development, with special reference to the agreement’s provisions related to ensuring universal access to reproductive health and rights.

World Summit on Sustainable Development

The importance of meeting women’s needs also played a key role at a two-week preparatory meeting for this fall’s World Summit on Sustainable Development. The March 25-April 5 meeting looked at a wide range of issues, including the need to provide water to the more than 1 billion people without access to safe drinking water and global energy issues. Recent estimates have indicated that women in the least developed countries of the world spend as much as two-thirds of their time collecting the water and fuelwood needed to meet family needs. Earlier this year, Ms. Obaid urged nations preparing for the Summit not to forget about population-women-environment linkages.

At the preparatory meeting, delegates urged that the text under negotiation go further in recognizing key gender issues related to environmental protection and economic progress.

Second World Assembly on Aging

In Madrid, Spain, delegates at the Second World Assembly on Aging April 8-12 worked to address the challenges posed by a rapidly aging world as people live longer than ever before. A study issued by the United Nations Population Fund finds key linkages between global aging, poverty and the status of women. The report calls for meeting older persons’ needs for health care, social services, care and protection against violence.

In a joint statement, UNFPA Executive Director Thoraya Obaid and the Administrator of the UN Development Programme, Mark Malloch-Brown, urged that participants recognize the growing problem of gender-based violence. “[It] is increasingly becoming recognized as a problem in many countries where older women, particularly those that are widowed, are often victims of abuse – physical, emotional, financial and sexual,” the UN leaders said. Obaid and Malloch-Brown urged adoption of an ageing agenda that includes: lifelong education and training, supporting older persons in care-giving to orphans of HIV/AIDS, eliminating violence, supporting gender-sensitive research on ageing and strengthening social protection schemes for older persons.

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