The world has made genuine progress towards achieving the ambitious programme outlined at the 1994 ICPD, a United Nations report found, but a serious funding shortfall is obstructing efforts to provide universal access to reproductive health care, combat HIV/AIDS and improve maternal health.
The State of World Population 2004 report, issued by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) , shows that donors have given only half of what they promised.
In Cairo, international donors pledged to give US$6.1 billion a year by 2005 for population and reproductive health programmes, but in 2002 – donors were giving only $3.1 billion.
The report, entitled The Cairo Consensus at Ten: Population, Reproductive Health and the Global Effort to End Poverty, released on 15 September (see below), indicates that the huge funding gap is having a negative ripple effect, retarding progress in health, education and other fields, especially for women and girls.
More than 350 million couples worldwide, for example, do not have access to a full range of family planning services; at least 500,000 women die each year from problems caused by pregnancy or childbirth, and most of those deaths are preventable; countless girls are unable to attend school; and five million people were infected with HIV last year.
Adolescent health care also remains a problem, with early marriage and childbearing the norm for girls in many countries, and women aged below 24 disproportionately represented in statistics for sexually transmitted diseases.
But the UNFPA review finds that there have been many advances since 179 governments agreed in 1994 that poverty could be reduced and economic growth sustained if women were given greater rights and if access to reproductive health services was made universal.
The percentage of couples using modern contraception has risen from 55 per cent to 61 per cent; laws and policies to protect the rights of women, especially against violence, have been put in place; and population issues have become integrated into the heart of poverty-reduction strategies. Many countries are also much more aware of the need to tackle the scourge of HIV/AIDS, according to the report.
Launching the report in London, Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, UNFPA Executive Director, cited the impressive gains made by countries worldwide since the ICPD, yet stressed the lack of resources for reproductive health needs. “Unless international assistance rises to the levels agreed to at the Cairo Conference, the numbers of people who need family planning, maternal health care and HIV/AIDS prevention, testing and treatment will continue to grow. Lack of reproductive health care will continue to be the leading cause of death for women in the developing world and the AIDS pandemic will continue to expand and wreak havoc”.
“This year’s report is, above all, a call to mobilize the political will and resources needed to make the Cairo vision a reality”, she concluded.