PRESS
RELEASE
The ICPD+5 review
process
THIRD ICPD+5 ROUND TABLE, ON
PARTNERSHIP WITH CIVIL SOCIETY, STARTS IN
BANGLADESH
UNFPA Executive Director
Stresses
Need to Broaden Participation and Overcome Mistrust
among Partners
DHAKA, Bangladesh, 27 July -- The Speaker of
Parliament of Bangladesh and leading figures in the Ministry of
Health and Family Welfare today joined the Executive Director of the
United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) in opening the Round Table on
Partnership with Civil Society in the Implementation of the ICPD
Programme of Action. More than 250 people heard their opening
statements, including about 70 round-table participants from some 40
countries.
The 27-30 July meeting is the third in a series of round tables,
organized by UNFPA as part of ICPD+5, a year-long evaluation of
progress made in the five years since the 1994 International
Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo.
Participants will assess achievements and constraints in involving
civil society in the implementation of the ICPD Programme of Action,
and propose key future actions to carry forward the progress made so
far.
The meeting will feature presentations on four themes around
which working groups have been formed: Partnership to create an
enabling environment for carrying out the Programme of Action;
Social mobilization to promote and carry out the Programme;
Partnership for capacity-strengthening, accountability,
coalition-building and financial stability; and Partnership to
promote full access to reproductive health services.
In her opening address, UNFPA Executive Director Dr. Nafis Sadik
said there is widespread agreement today on the value of development
partnerships between governments and "civil society" -- including
"non-governmental organizations and other private associations,
community institutions, religious leaders, business associations,
professional groups, trade unions, media, and various activist
groups and individuals, among others"; the Programme of Action, she
noted, emphasizes the need for such partnerships.
A key aim of the round table, she stressed, is to find creative
ways to build the widest possible range of constituencies to promote
the Cairo consensus. Achieving this goal depends on overcoming
mistrust between partners.
"Governments are sometimes leery of activist groups because of
their potential for opposition and disruption," Dr. Sadik said.
"Such groups on the other hand, are sometimes strident in their
criticisms, alienating potential partners. What we need are
dialogue, cooperation and synergy."
UNFPA has been working with civil society groups, especially
non-governmental organizations (NGOs), for more than 15 years, and
has accepted hundreds of NGOs as executing agencies for
UNFPA-supported projects, the Executive Director said. More than 15
per cent of its current allocations are for projects directly
executed by such groups, with much higher proportions in some
country programmes (53 per cent in Haiti, 40 per cent in South
Africa and 32 per cent in Egypt, for instance).
Dr. Sadik said NGOs and other sectors of civil society can help
win support for and help design programmes, lobby for better quality
programmes, monitor service delivery, mobilize resources and
advocate changes in laws, policies and guidelines. The private
sector, for example, can play roles that go beyond the manufacture
and distribution of contraceptive products; private employers can
educate their staff on issues such as gender-based violence and
human rights. Religious and community leaders can also make a
difference, she added. For example, the spiritual leader of Al-Azhar
University in Egypt supported reproductive health when he declared
that family planning does not contravene the Koran.
In his address to the opening session, the chief guest and
Speaker of the Bangladeshi Parliament, Humayun Rashid Chowdhury,
said the race to slow population growth has become an absorbing
topic of discussion across many sectors of society. Economic
problems and increasing population, he said, are placing increasing
stress on many countries’ ability to continue developing; resource
mobilization and partnership with various actors in civil society
are therefore critical to efforts to check today’s unprecedented
rates of population growth.
Lawmakers’ involvement in that endeavour is crucial, he
continued, since they represent the people of their respective
countries, whose support is required for all measures to meet the
goals of the ICPD Programme of Action. Bangladesh can make
significant contributions to ICPD implementation even as it tackles
the low standard of living of its hard-core poor, provides emergency
assistance to children, strives to reduce malnutrition and poverty,
and works to empower women.
The Minister of Health and Family Welfare, SalahuddinYusuf,
reported that, in line with ICPD recommendations, Bangladesh has
recently unified its health and family planning programmes, as part
of its effort to accelerate development to keep pace with population
growth. Since its founding in 1971, he said, the country has lowered
fertility and improved child health care; its contraceptive
prevalence rate has risen by 50 per cent, fertility has dropped to
3.3 children per woman, child immunization has jumped from 10 to 70
per cent, and deaths of children under 5 have been cut considerably.
But Bangladesh still has a 1.7 per cent growth rate, and its
population will increase from 124 million people to nearly 220
million in the next 50 years. The Government looks forward to
recommendations from the round table to help it alleviate poverty,
he added.
The Secretary of the same ministry, Muhammed Ali, said Bangladesh
feels the pressure of population growth due to lack of resources and
land, making intervention in population necessary to develop human
resources. The Government has made significant progress in lowering
mortality among mothers and children, set up programmes to tackle
its population- and poverty-related problems, and created mechanisms
for implementing the ICPD Programme of Action.
Since Cairo, it has introduced a client-centred reproductive
health care approach which Mr. Ali said will increase the
cost-effective use of resources, give clients a "one-stop shopping"
option for reproductive health and other basic services, improve the
quality of services, and increase access for the poor, women and
children.
Civil society was represented in the opening session by Fazle
Hasan Abed, founder and Executive Director of a Bangladeshi NGO
called BRAC. He said his group’s efforts to increase women’s access
to income had improved their health and reduced their fertility.
Along with income- and employment-generation, BRAC works with
community organizations of the poor, helping to raise awareness of
social issues, and providing microcredit, health care, training and
capacity development for poor women. With 20,000 full-time staff, it
works in 50,000 villages in Bangladesh and provides financial and
technical support to 2.5 million women, giving them loans of some
$150 million in 1997 alone. Under its health programme, BRAC covers
34 million people in more than 25,000 villages.
"Cairo is synonymous with inclusiveness, cooperation and
consensus," he continued, and civil society groups should help
spread the message of the Programme of Action. Men and women should
also be organized into partnerships to build better futures for
women; such an alliance must start immediately, he added. "The
lesson we have from BRAC is that we have to build from our own
successes and learn from our failures," he said. "For this
partnership to succeed, we must not forget the need for capacity
building in the civil society organizations."
Also attending the opening session were the State Minister for
Health and Family Welfare, Dr. M. Amanullah, and members of
Bangladesh’s Parliament.
(For information purposes only. Not an official
document.)
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