Dramatic call at Women Deliver 2013

KUALA LUMPUR – Women Deliver 2013 is a dramatic call to action for governments and the private sector to place girls and women on top of their agenda. Some 3,500 participants from 145 countries,  including parliamentarians, officials from government and private agencies, policy  makers,  healthcare professionals, funders and donors, and representatives of NGOs, are in the second day of a global summit that addresses and aims to ensure the health and rights of girls and women.

A slew of speakers spoke today about the gains and challenges made in the status of girls and women during the last two decades, and moving it forward to meet the Medium Development Goal 5, which is reducing  maternal mortality.

The stellar attraction at the plenary session today was Melinda Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, whose primary concern is family planning.  Melinda made headlines by spearheading the  London  Summit  on Family Planning, with the goal of delivering contraceptives to an additional 120 million women in developing countries by 2020.  At the summit donors committed $2.6  billion to this vision.

Family planning is a priority for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. At the London summit in 2012,  Melinda announced that the Foundation was  increasing its investment in family planning by $560 million over the next eight years. That amounts to a doubling of its  current investment, bringing the total figure to more than $1 billion from 2012 until 2020.

She said today, “’Women tell us that having access to contraceptives will help them build a good life for themselves and their families. A woman, she said, may have access to contraceptives on paper but she doesn’t have access to the life she desires for her family. And that is the entire reason we’re here.  We are here because we know that women who have the power to decide when to get pregnant also have the power to make a better future.”

Other speakers spoke about the status of women in their country.  At yesterday’s plenary session, Malaysia Prime Minister Najib Razak boasted his country’s lifting the status of the women in his country in the areas of family planning, education, and governance. Today’s speaker, Senegal health minister Dr. Awa Marie Coll-seck talked about her government’s active participation in the promotion of family planning.

Dr. Enrique Ona, our health secretary,  spoke of this year being “amazing” for family planning advocates as they finally hurdled and achieved the passage of the Responsible Parenthood and Reproductive  Health Act (RPRA)  after nearly 15 years  and five congresses.  While President Aquino signed the bill into law, 11 Petitions were filed with the Supreme Court  challenging the constitutionality of the RPHA Act, resulting in the Court’s issuance of a status quo ante order, which temporarily restrained government from implementing the Act. Even with the Act being suspended, the government has been investing heavily in a family planning program, with development partners and local government units procuring family planning products and providing services to benefit the 2.2 million women of reproductive are who are identified poor.

Why is there so much emphasis on family planning at this summit?

Understandably because family planning is a part  of the health and well-being of girls and women, of gender equality, of stopping maternal deaths from pregnancy and/or childbirth-related complications, and of  women being disproportionately impacted by HIV.

Thus the call for investing in girls and women.  You and I agree that the health and wellbeing of girls and women lead to prosperity. Women dying from pregnancy- related complications means expenses for their families and the hospitals they are brought to. Babies  born unspaced, and too many, tax a mother’s health, time, and scanty resources,  and gives no assurance of adequate food, shelter, clothing and education for the children.

With donors investing in family planning programs, Women  Deliver say the benefits to girls and women would be reduced unintended pregnancies by 68%, averted newborn deaths by 35%, and reduced unsafe abortion by 70 %.  The  impact on our global economy would be $15 billion saved annually due to improved productivity, cut in time lost from pregnancy-related illness and death, and increased female productivity and employment.

Women Deliver 2013 tackles various issues affecting girls and women: violence, child marriages, women infected with HIV, faith and family planning, the abortion stigma,  contraceptive choice, breast cancer detection, sexual and reproductive rights as human rights; criminal laws an punitive sanctions, emergency contraception,  among others.

The woman behind Women Deliver is Jill Sheffield, a global educator and advocate who has worked to promote women’s health and rights around the world for more than three decades. The first Woman Deliver conference took place in  October 2007, and was credited with putting Millennium Development Goal 5 on the international agenda.  The second was in 2010, in  Washington, D.C.

Jill’s bio notes that her commitment to women’s reproductive rights in developing countries was inspired while volunteering for a family planning clinic at the Pumwani  Maternity  Hospital in Kenya in the mid-1960s, where she initially worked as a teacher.  At that time, while the feminist movement was flourishing at home in the USA, the Kenyan women she met through the clinic were legally barred from using contraception without their husbands’ permission. This inequity became the driving force in  Sheffield’s transition from teaching to a global crusader for women’s reproductive rights.

She then co-founded Family Care International,  a non-profit global organization committed to improving the maternal health of women in the world’s poorest nations. She and FCI launched the Safe Motherhood Initiative also in 1987, to help guide global efforts to improve maternal health over the past two decades.

 She was awarded the 2008 United Nations Population Award for outstanding work in sexual, reproductive health and rights, and received the American Public Health Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

In Kuala Lumpur, Sheffeld’s message rings loud and clear:  “Girls are too often left out. Safe, healthy, and educated women will transform the world. When we invest in girls and women, it is not only the right thing to do, it is the smart thing to do.”

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