Media Advisory
Decision Makers, Development Experts to Highlight Importance of Population Issues at Istanbul Meeting
14 May 2012
UNITED NATIONS, New York—Leading actors from the international development community will meet in Istanbul on 24 -25 May to discuss strategies to speed up achievement of the Programme of Action of the 1994 Cairo International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD). Participants will focus on how to ensure that women’s and young people’s rights and sexual and reproductive well-being remain a priority in the future guiding principles of international development.
The conference’s scheduled speakers include:
• Recep Tayyip Erdo?an, Prime Minister of Türkiye
• Dr. Babatunde Osotimehin, Executive Director, UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund
• Sandra Elisabeth Roelofs, First Lady of Georgia & WHO Goodwill Ambassador
• Christian Friis Bach, Member of Parliament, Minister for Development Cooperation, Denmark
• Carolyn Maloney, Congresswoman, United States House of Representatives
The gathering is particularly crucial as world population has passed 7 billion, and the deadlines originally set for the ICPD Programme of Action (2014) and the Millennium Development Goals (2015) are fast approaching. In this fifth edition of the biennial IPCI/ICPD conference, law makers, ministers and leading development experts will discuss progress by world governments in living up to their leaders’ pledge at the ICPD. At that ground-breaking forum, in Cairo in 1994, they underscored the importance of putting individuals’ reproductive health at the heart of development policies and committed to making this a priority for the following 20 years.
Participants are expected to make a strong commitment that will feed into the international discussion on the future of the post-MDG and ICPD development framework. The statement will also contribute to the family planning summit, to be held by the UK Government’s Department for International Development, the Gates Foundation and other partners, including UNFPA, in London in July.
The Istanbul conference is being organized by UNFPA and the European Parliamentary Forum on Population and Development, under the auspices of the Grand National Assembly of Türkiye.
For additional information please contact:
Omar Gharzeddine, UNFPA: gharzeddine@unfpa.org; + 1 212 279 5028
Eddie Wright, EPF: eddie@epfweb.org, + 32 2 500 86 51
Nezih Tavlas, UNFPA: tavlas@unfpa.org, + 90 543 45 211 45
