PRESS
RELEASE
The ICPD+5 review
process
Donors Should Negotiate
Debt Relief
to Release Funds for Social Services,
Meeting on Ageing Recommends
Experts Say Effects of Structural Adjustment
Programmes
on Older Persons and Women Must Be
Evaluated
BRUSSELS, 9 October 1998 -- International donors
should consider renegotiating the external debts of poor countries
to release funds for social services for older persons, participants
at the Technical Meeting on Population Ageing recommended as they
concluded here. The recommendation came from the working group on
economic issues. Other recommendations were adopted on meeting older
persons' needs with regard to health care and social services,
demography, research and training.
About 40 experts took part
in the four-day meeting, which was part of "ICPD+5", the review of
the achievements of the 1994 International Conference on Population
and Development (ICPD). Organized by the United Nations Population
Fund (UNFPA) and the Population and Family Study Centre (CBGS), a
Flemish Scientific Institute in Brussels, it reviewed the
experiences of developed countries in population ageing to identify
practices that can be adopted by developing nations.
The
meeting featured the presentation of some 20 technical papers,
followed by working group meetings and a panel discussion on country
policies, poverty and gender aspects of ageing. Papers were
presented in six sessions on: the Process, Dimensions and Prospects
of Ageing; Promotion and Maintenance of Health in Later Life (6
October); Support Systems for the Elderly; Special Needs (7
October); and the Economic and Social Policy Implications of an
Older Society (8-9 October). The meeting was opened on 6 October by
the General Director of the CBGS, Robert Cliquet, who described
population ageing as one of the important issues of the ICPD as well
as for the industrialized nations and their developing
counterparts.
On the meeting's final day, participants made
other recommendations on economic issues. For example, they proposed
that governments and international organizations integrate into
development strategies the economic and social consequences of
ageing, and consider relations between children, younger and older
adults.
Governments and international organizations should
establish gender-sensitive population policies where fertility is
below replacement level and ageing is advancing, the meeting
proposed. These should aim to provide wider access to education,
reproductive health services, job creation and adequate housing, and
to remove barriers that prevent older persons from continuing to
work.
The meeting recommended various mechanisms to enable
ageing persons to leave the workforce gradually, including job
redesign, flexible pension arrangements, temporary or home-office
work and mentoring. It also called for: strengthened state provision
of social and health services, particularly for the elderly, women
and children; access to small-scale credit schemes to enable older
people to participate in income-generating programmes; and greater
research into economic transfers between younger and older people
and the contributions of the latter to the labour market.
Noting the inequitable impact of structural adjustment
policies on older persons and women, the working group on health
care and social services recommended that economic reforms be
evaluated for their effects on vulnerable
groups.
Participants also called on governments not to
abandon their commitment to providing basic services, clean water,
adequate nutrition, housing, access to work, health care,
transportation and healthy environments. They agreed that the
reproductive health of all people, especially women, should be
ensured throughout their life course, because of its importance to
the quality of life at older stages.
Governments should
encourage older persons to use local health facilities as part of
prevention programmes and to promote healthier lifestyles,
participants recommended. They should promote equitable access and
help health care workers reach the elderly. Recognizing the social,
economic and cultural disadvantages faced by care givers who are
mainly female, they stressed that authorities and non-governmental
organizations should design appropriate strategies to end pay
inequities and to give those workers recognition.
In closing
remarks, the Director of UNFPA's Technical and Policy Division,
Mohammed Nizamuddin, expressed regret that the Executive Director,
Dr. Nafis Sadik, could not attend the meeting as scheduled. Many of
the ideas generated at the meeting will be useful to UNFPA's
programming, he said, particularly in shaping his division's next
four-year programming cycle.
The General Director of CBGS,
Robert Cliquet, said his institute will publish the meeting's
proceedings. Participants should be optimistic that their
recommendations will be put to good use. He will follow-up on those
proposals as a member of Belgium's delegations to some of the
upcoming ICPD+5 events.
As part of the ICPD+5 process, UNFPA
has sponsored a series of technical meetings and round-table
discussions, leading up to an international forum on ICPD
implementation, to be held in February 1999 in The Hague,
Netherlands. The report on the meeting on ageing will be
consolidated into a document for review by the Hague Forum and as
background for the Secretary-General's report to a special session
of the United Nations General Assembly on post-ICPD progress, to be
held in June-July 1999.
The just-concluded meeting was held a
week after this year's International Day of Older Persons,, during
which the United Nations declared 1999 the International Year of
Older Persons. Ageing also is one of the main themes of UNFPA's
flagship publication, The State of World
Population 1998, entitled "The New
Generations".
(For information purposes only. Not
an official document.)
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