| Monitoring the Flow of Financial Resources to Population Activities
The ICPD goals and the MDGs cannot be achieved without the financial means to do so. UNFPA plays an important leadership role in mobilizing and monitoring financial resources for population and reproductive health programmes. It monitors both international and domestic financial resources for such programmes, and tracks progress towards achieving the financial resource goals that the ICPD agreed would be needed to implement its Programme of Action.
The ICPD called upon the international community to “achieve an adequate level of resource mobilization and allocation, at the community, national and international levels, for population programmes and for other related programmes, all of which seek to promote and accelerate social and economic development, improve the quality of life for all, foster equity and full respect for individual rights and, by so doing, contribute to sustainable development.”
The ICPD estimated that in the developing countries and countries with economies in transition, the implementation of programmes in the area of reproductive health, including those related to family planning, maternal health and the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases, as well as those that address the collection and analysis of population data, would cost $17 billion per annum by the year 2000. Approximately two thirds of the projected costs were expected to come from domestic sources and one third, or $5.7 billion, from the international donor community.
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| 2000 |
$11.3 |
$5.7 |
$17.0 |
| 2005 |
$12.4 |
$6.1 |
$18.5 |
| 2010 |
$13.7 |
$6.8 |
$20.5 |
| 2015 |
$14.5 |
$7.2 |
$21.7 |
Funding for population has increased since Cairo, but the goal of mobilizing $17 billion a year for population activities by 2000 was not met. In 2003, annual donor funding for population activities stood at almost $4.7 million, or 77 per cent of what donors had committed at the ICPD to provide by 2005. Developing country domestic expenditures for the package were estimated at $11 billion in 2003.
However, a large portion of the developing countries’ outlay comes from a few large countries such as Brazil, China, India, Indonesia and Mexico. Many countries, particularly the poorest, with low per-capita expenditures on health, depend mainly on international assistance for their family planning, reproductive health, HIV prevention and population-related data, research and policy needs.
Both donor and developing countries must continue to mobilize resources to fully implement the ICPD agenda. The challenge before the international community is to move from declarations of good intentions to active partnerships and investments. Mobilizing the resources to reach the ICPD goal of universal access to reproductive health care by 2015 is essential if the promises of the Millennium Declaration are to be realized.
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For many years, UNFPA regularly collected data and issued an annual Global Population Assistance Report tracking international financial assistance to population activities. In light of the ICPD and at the request of the Commission on Population and Development, UNFPA updated its reporting system and expanded its monitoring to collect data on domestic allocations.
In 1997, UNFPA began collaborating with the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI) on The Resource Flows Project to monitor global financial flows for population and AIDS activities. The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) joined the collaboration in 1999. UNFPA publishes its findings in its annual Financial Resource Flows for Population Activities report. The report is intended to be a tool for donor and developing country governments, multilateral organizations and agencies, private foundations and non-governmental organizations to monitor progress in achieving the ICPD’s financial resource targets.
NIDI collects the data for UNFPA’s report, using a system of classification of population activities that reflects the “costed population package” of the ICPD Programme of Action. It provides information on donor assistance and domestic expenditures for population activities, including family planning services, basic reproductive health services, programmes related to HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, basic research, data collection and population and development policy analysis. |
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