Where Are We Now?
Report Card Finds Mixed Results Worldwide 10 Years After
179 Governments Pledged to Improve Health and Womens Status
Twenty-three countries have made significant progress toward the health and reproductive rights goals of the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), but 17 countries have achieved little or nothing, or actually lost ground, according to a new report card.
The report card, “ICPD at Ten: Where Are We Now?”, is the centrepiece of Countdown 2015: Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights for All, a special edition magazine released by Population Action International (PAI), Family Care International (FCI) and the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF).
The release marked the start of the three-day Countdown 2015 Global Roundtable in London, where more than 700 leaders, parliamentarians, and activists in reproductive health and family planning from 109 countries are gathering to assess progress made – and progress needed – to meet ICPD goals by the 2015 deadline. More than 100 young people are among the participants.
– When women have opportunities, it changes everything, said Amy Coen, President of PAI. – Investing in sexual and reproductive health and rights transforms lives: a womans life, her familys life, and in turn, the social and economic life of her entire country, added she.
FCI President Jill W. Sheffield said: – Much more needs to be done to make the ICPD goals a reality. We are far more than the sum of our parts. By working together, we can meet the challenge of ensuring universal access to sexual and reproductive health services.
The report card first ranks 133 countries with population of one million or more on 13 indicators of reproductive health risk that are ICPD objectives and Millennium Development Goals, dividing the countries into five categories, from highest-risk to lowest-risk.
It then looks at 62 of the countries that have data on a smaller set of these indicators, and ranks those countries on their direction and pace of change.
– Among the countries making the most progress in the past decade are Tunisia, Bangladesh, Nepal, Peru, and the Philippines.
– Those making little or no progress include the United States, Portugal and Kuwait in the developed world, and Botswana, Namibia, Senegal and South Africa in the developing world.
– Burkina Faso and Cameroon are two countries found to have lost ground since 1994.
Key highlights:
– Access to contraceptives has improved worldwide, but 123 million couples want to wait before having another child, yet cannot get access to effective family planning methods.
– More women hold policy-making offices worldwide, but women are still under-represented in parliaments.
– Much of the world has made significant progress toward gender parity in secondary school enrolment.
– Despite some liberalisation of abortion laws, one in every ten pregnancies still ends in unsafe abortion—about 19 million per year. Unsafe abortion kills one woman every seven minutes.
– The rate of adolescent pregnancy remains much the same as it was in 1994.
– A woman dies every minute from the complications of pregnancy or childbirth. Little progress has been made since 1994 to save these women’s lives.
– Many more women are in the formal workforce than in 1994, but they still earn less than men in most places.
– HIV infection rates have increased exponentially since 1994 and in many countries, women now account for more than half of those infected.
Note: Many countries lacked data on one or more of the indicators; those lacking data on five or more were not ranked in the survey. These included Afghanistan, Denmark, Hong Kong, Ireland and Venezuela, among others.
For more information see www.countdown2015.org or www.planetwire.org
