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Programme Priorities |
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| Advocacy | |
Reproductive Health, including Family Planning and Sexual Health
Population and Development
Strategies
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The aim of advocacy, in general, is threefold: to support a particular cause or issue; to promote or reinforce change in policy, programmes or legislation; and to create a supportive environment for programmes and to mobilize resources. Advocacy is, by its nature, public-policy oriented and oppositional at times and requires networking and coalition-building to broaden the base of support. In recent years, UNFPA has assumed a vigorous advocacy role to promote the goals of the ICPD Programme of Action. At the international level, UNFPA raises awareness of reproductive health and population issues to mobilize support and resources for the implementation of ICPD and to enhance the visibility of UNFPA as an organization. At the country level, the Fund's advocacy activities are an integral part of UNFPA-supported country programmes and are designed to assist countries in reaching the goals of national population programmes. Many of the issues brought forward at ICPD still need to be fully understood, promoted and adopted at the national and community levels, especially in such sensitive areas as gender-based violence, quality of care, male involvement, and adolescent reproductive health and rights. Promoting support for ICPD is the focus of much of the advocacy work that UNFPA undertakes at the country level as part of its country programmes. Such advocacy activities are necessarily intertwined with the substantive activities being supported - adolescent reproductive health and the reduction of violence against women, for example - and, as such, are likewise integrated into the various topics examined throughout this report. The Fund's "Face to Face" campaign is one of the key activities used to achieve greater public awareness of population and reproductive health issues. The campaign, which uses celebrity Goodwill Ambassadors as spokespersons on a variety of issues, was expanded successfully throughout 1998. In January, actress Linda Gray, Face to Face campaign chairperson and spokesperson for the United States of America, hosted a round-table seminar attended by senior-level corporate women from throughout the United States. Supermodel Waris Dirie, Special Ambassador for the Elimination of Female Genital Mutilation and Face to Face Campaign spokesperson, was a popular speaker for the elimination of FGM at international conferences and in many media interviews. She was a keynote speaker at the Fiftieth Anniversary Celebration of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at the Peace Palace in The Hague on 29 October. Other Goodwill Ambassadors included Geri Halliwell of the United Kingdom, a singer and entertainment personality; Kattis Ahlstrom, a Swedish journalist and radio/television host and producer; Magenta Devine, a radio and television personality based in the United Kingdom; Mikko Kuustonen, a Finnish songwriter, singer and human rights activist; and Keiko Kishi, a Japanese actress and television personality. Informational publications issued by UNFPA in 1998 that were designed for international audiences included The State of World Population 1998: The New Generations; the Annual Report; a revision of the Population Issues Briefing Kit; 10 issues of the news bulletin Dispatches and four issues of the UNFPA magazine Populi; and a new booklet in UNFPA's advocacy series, UNFPA at Work: Five Country Profiles, which described the Fund's country-level operations in Burkina Faso, Eritrea, India, Nicaragua and the Syrian Arab Republic. An electronic version of State of World Population 1998 was the most-visited document on UNFPA's popular Web site (www. unfpa.org). The Internet site is now a key source of information for the public on the Fund's work and on population and reproductive health issues generally, with an average of 800 visitors a day. In 1998 the variety and volume of information continued to expand. The site was redesigned to accommodate more information and was made easier to navigate and use. The ICPD+5 section of UNFPA's Web site, created in 1998, was continually updated to provide timely information on the full range of activities being undertaken in connection with the five-year review. UNFPA produced a great variety of posters, exhibits and multimedia materials in 1998, including a UNFPA CD-ROM containing 30 Web sites with more than 84,000 cross links and 50 software applications; an institutional video, UNFPA Is Making a Difference; six video news releases on issues including safe motherhood, UNFPA Goodwill Ambassadors and the launch of The State of World Population report. A poster competition and poster production were organized for World Population Day on 11 July. Such advocacy efforts seem to be having some effect. Opinion polls have shown that awareness among the general public on population-related issues and reproductive health has been steadily increasing since ICPD. As a result of media outreach efforts through, for example, video news releases, press conferences and the work of the Goodwill Ambassadors, UNFPA has become increasingly well known by the general public, in both developed and developing countries. It also continues to enjoy credibility among journalists as a reliable source of information on population-related issues. Despite these successes, opinion polls in developed countries have shown that while the public considered such issues to be important, they did not necessarily see direct connections between achieving ICPD goals and other issues that they regarded as being crucial to the future of the world, such as the environment, poverty, migration and war. |