UNFPA's Contribution to Meeting the MDGs:
Findings from the United Nations Millennium Project

Sexual and Reproductive Health Findings

The United Nations Millennium Project found that ensuring access to sexual and reproductive health information and services, including voluntary family planning, is essential for achieving the MDGs.

Additional information and sources:

• A two-page spread in Chapter 5 of Investing in Development (Box 5.5, ) as well as Box 3.1 in Chapter 3 discuss the importance of ensuring universal access to sexual and reproductive health services and information for achieving the MDGs. "The current situation shows how devastating the neglect of sexual and reproductive health can be. The differences in reproductive health – between the rich and the poor and within and between countries – are larger than in many other areas of healthcare…Sexual and reproductive health services should be integrated into a strengthened health system."

• Ensuring universal access to reproductive health services is essential for improving the nutritional status of pregnant women and their children, in particular through the proper spacing of births, according to the Hunger Task Force.

• Increasing women's and adolescents' access to a broad range of sexual and reproductive health information and services is one of the seven priorities for action identified by the Education and Gender Equality Task Force . This task force also recommends that the following additional SRH-relevant indicators be used to monitor Goal 3:

• adolescent fertility rate
• proportion of demand for family planning satisfied.

• The Child Health and Maternal Health Task Force recommends that an additional target be included for monitoring Goal 5: Universal access to reproductive health services by 2015 through the primary health care system, ensuring the same rate of progress or faster amongst the poor and other marginalized groups. The task force also recommends that a group of sexual and reproductive health indicators be used together for monitoring various MDGs – with the intention of measuring the systematic impact on women's ability to bring into effect their stated fertility preferences and to have safe, voluntary and healthy sexual and reproductive lives and parenthood
  
  Recommended Sexual and Reproductive Health Indicators:
  
  
  • Contraceptive prevalence rate (currently Goal 6, with recommended allocation to Goal 5)
  • HIV prevalence among 15-24 year old women (Goal 6)
  • Proportion of births attended by skilled birth attendants (Goal 5)
  • Proportion of demand for family planning satisfied (Goals 3 and 5)
  • Adolescent fertility rate (Goals 3 and 5)
  • Availability of emergency obstetric care (Goal 5)
    
    

• The fight against HIV/AIDS and the broader struggle for reproductive health should be mutually reinforcing. National governments should incorporate universal access to reproductive and sexual health services and information as an integral part of their AIDS responses,” according to the HIV/AIDS Task Force. It also recommended greater integration of HIV with reproductive health services, including mother-to-child transmission, voluntary counseling and testing, family planning, and safe motherhood.

• "Population growth, with continued levels of fertility higher than people say they desire contributes both to natural growth in urban areas and to the factors pushing migration from rural areas to urban areas and new rural settlements…fertility is highest in the poorest countries as well as among the poorest people in these and middle income societies. It is clearly then no surprise that these same places have the highest levels of unmet need for family planning and reproductive health services, which, in concert with other health, education and gender equality issues, must be addressed with policies and programs to slow population growth and realize synergistic improvements." From the Environmental Sustainability Task Force.

• "Poor urban women also have worse sexual and reproductive health outcomes than other urban women, and at times, their outcomes rival those of rural residents…Poor urban women are also much less likely to use contraception than other urban women, and again in some regions their usage rates resemble that for rural women (forexample, in Southeast Asia)," according to the Slum Dwellers Task Force. That report also noted that w hen poor urban women give birth, they are less likely than other urban women to have these births attended by a physician or nurse/midwife. And, finally, they are at high risk of contracting sexually transmitted infections, including HIV/AIDS.