UNFPA Leader Appeals for Africa’s Renewal With Better Health, Rights for Women

KAMPALA, Uganda — UNFPA’s Executive Director, Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, made a strong appeal for Africa’s renewal through the provision of reproductive health and the promotion of women’s right, at a lecture at Makerere University. She gave the lecture one day after Africa’s leaders committed their governments and the African Union to putting maternal health higher on development agendas.

Speaking from the Main Hall of the famous university, Ms. Obaid said that the real challenge for African renewal, as many countries marked the fiftieth anniversary of their independence, was to give real sense to that independence by helping women so they no longer died as they gave life. Her lecture, on Reproductive Health and Rights: Perspective for Further Development in Africa, was delivered to a hall that was filled with academics, students, development workers and religious leaders.

“I know that Africa is on the move and I have faith in its capacity to achieve the dreams of its people through and by its people, women and men, young and old,” Ms. Obaid said, and congratulated the African Union for convincing Heads of State and Government to adopt maternal health as the theme of the just-ended Kampala Summit.

“Maternal, infant and child health is one of the most strategic issues that should concern the leadership of Africa because this issue is about the reality of the present and the hopes for the future of this continent”, said Ms. Obaid, adding that reproductive health and rights were also “an indispensible part of the journey of hope and renewal for Africa”.

The UNFPA Executive Director’s statement was built around a 10-point argument for greater investments in the sexual and reproductive health of women. A critical element of the view was that investing in women was smart economics. This was not only because investing in women’s health and rights was one of the best investments in development, but also because “a single year of secondary schooling can translate into an increase of 10 per cent to 20 per cent in future wages”.

Reproductive health information, services and rights were pivotal to expanding women’s choices and opportunities, Ms. Obaid said, adding that this enabled women to contribute to greater social, environmental and economic progress for all.
For example, family planning services enabled women to not only plan their families, but also the rest of their lives, Ms. Obaid continued. If a woman cannot decide voluntarily on the number and spacing of her pregnancies, she could not decide on many things in her life.

Ms. Obaid described lack of access to services as a hallmark of poverty, adding that it was also a denial of the right to health and other rights. As a result, poor, uneducated young women had the least information and services, and only 17 per cent of women of childbearing age in sub-Saharan Africa used modern contraceptives.

And about 60 per cent of women who wanted to avoid a pregnancy were not using family planning or were using traditional methods, said Ms. Obaid. In addition, almost 80 per cent of those who needed care each year for complications of pregnancy and delivery failed to receive it. If reproductive health services were provided to all women who need them, maternal deaths would be reduced by 70 per cent, newborn deaths cut nearly in half and 750,000 lives would be saved each year, Ms. Obaid said.

There was good news in the shape of a growing momentum and action to save lives and protect the right to health in Africa, said the UNFPA Executive Director. African nations, she said, were making progress guided by the Maputo Plan of Action, while the international community was mobilizing further support.

For example, the Group of Eight (G-8) Summit in Canada had pledged to mobilize an additional $7.5 billion over five years to reduce maternal, newborn and child deaths in developing countries. And the United Nations Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, will host a special event around the September’s MDG Summit to launch a Joint Action Plan to improve women’s and children’s health. He would underscore the need for government commitment and investments, and African leadership would be critical, Ms. Obaid said.

“When governments invest in reproductive health, together with education and employment, they can put their country on a path to prosperity,” said Ms. Obaid. “When a country moves from high to low rates of death and birth through a demographic transition, a window opens to accelerate economic growth. Economists have attributed as much as 40 per cent of East Asia’s per-capita income growth between 1965 and 1990 to its beneficial population structure, which was a result of an early investment in the health and education of young girls and boys as well as in reproductive health including family planning.”

“Africa has all the right policies and plans of actions – it now must put all its energies on implementation and scaling up programmes to cover as many of those who deserve and have the right to a better life,” the Executive Director said. “Many of the Heads of State and Government at the African Summit said that they do not need any more strategies or policies; they want action. Taking this commitment forward, African leaders will have to make reproductive health a priority and devote 15 per cent of their budgets to health as they agreed in Abuja. They also need to invest resources on training doctors, nurses and midwives to tackle the gap of 2.4 million health workers needed in Africa. And they also must invest in their retention in their work place.”

Contact Information:
Aloysius E. Fomenky
Communications Consultant, UNFPA
Email:  ebokemfomenky@yahoo.com