All countries now accept that population concerns are at the heart of sustainable development strategies. Rapid population growth and high fertility hold back development. They help to perpetuate poverty. They make it hard for countries to concentrate on the future because resources are soaked up by present needs.

But the Cairo conference also put an end to the concept of "population control". The Conference recognized that smaller families and slower population growth depend not on "control" but on free choice—the idea borne out by 30 years of experience that most women given the choice will have fewer children than their mothers did.

Choice means access to reproductive health care, including a range of family planning information and services, but it doesn’t stop there. Women and men must feel that the services available and the quality of care meet their reproductive health needs.

The Cairo agenda also means more attention to education for women and girls. It means leadership, encouraging family and community support for women’s choices. It means more women active in the community, in government at all levels, in the private sector. It means protection for women’s legal rights. It means, in three words, empowerment, equity and equality. It is a powerful idea. It is an idea whose time has come.

The ICPD’s 20-year programme is ambitious, but practical. It is the outcome of three years’ hard negotiation, and was agreed by all 179 countries, rich and poor, north and south, industrialized countries and developing countries, who attended the Cairo conference.

By 2015, it calls for:

• universal access to quality and affordable reproductive health services, including family planning and sexual health;
• significant reductions in infant, child and maternal mortality;
• broad-based measures to ensure gender equity and equality and the empowerment of women;
• universal access to primary education; and
• closing the "gender gap" in education.