A COMMITMENT TO EMPOWER

UNFPA's commitment to the WSC Plan of Action as well as to the ICDP Programme of Action is reflected in its efforts to devote resources to four major areas: girls' education, adolescent reproductive and sexual health; preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS; and reducing maternal mortality.

Empowering women - through educating girls in fields beyond society's ascribed roles - contributes substantially to the prevention of HIV/AIDS and the reduction of maternal deaths and disabilities. Without this, real progress in achieving reproductive health goals cannot proceed.

Educating girls, especially through and beyond the secondary level, for instance, has been logically and statistically linked to reducing maternal deaths and disabilities, delaying early marriage, and preventing unsafe sex. With a higher level of education, women earn and control their own incomes, adopt healthy lifestyles, use information which widens their opportunity to gain effective access to better health care, and tend to be more confident and assertive.

The degree to which adolescents' rights to reproductive and sexual health are recognised and respected influences the nature of the policies governments enact towards adolescents and the range of services governments as well as civil society provide. A restrictive view of adolescents and a non-recognition of their rights tend to ignore adolescents' needs and compromises the services they are entitled to. A more humane and enlightened view of adolescents, on the other hand, understands only too well that respecting the rights and fulfilling the needs of girls and boys now will affect the way they live out their lives as women and men in the future.

HIV/AIDS is as much an issue of gender and poverty as it is an issue of biology and access to information and services. It is not surprising therefore to observe that the prevalence of HIV/AIDS among women in developing countries is 37 times that of the prevalence among the relatively more powerful and independent women of industrialised countries. And the prevalence of HIV/AIDS in men in developing countries, who have much power relative to their female counterparts, is 9 times that of the prevalence of men in industrialised nations. Furthermore young women are more vulnerable than young men - in some Africa countries, average rates in teenage girls are over five times higher than those in teenage boys.

In preventing maternal deaths and disabilities, women's lives depend on their ability to decide whether - and when - they should seek medical care. In many parts of the world, women do not have within their control the power to decide on these reproductive choices. This life-saving decision-making power lies with their husbands, mothers-in-law, and their grandmothers.

Thus, empowering women underscores the ability to make genuine reproductive choices, to decide if and when they should give birth, and, if and when they should even have sex. These choices are influenced largely by their incomes, their ability to own property, their education and literacy levels, and their status within their families and their communities.