Forum (Spotlight Weekly)

Reproductive Health: Key To Poverty Reduction

By THORAYA AHMED OBAID

The theme of this year's State of World Population report, the 25th in the series the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has published every year since 1978, is poverty and its relationship to population questions. The report takes it as given that everyone should have voluntary access to reproductive health information and services - irrespective of any other effects it may have. However, this year, for the first time, the report is also able to show solid, research-based evidence that promoting better reproductive health also promotes economic growth and reduces poverty.

We can say this with confidence, on the basis of new research, with a time perspective that earlier research did not have.

The new analysis shows that actions that lower fertility help produce economic growth. Developing countries that have invested in family planning, smaller families and slower population growth have achieved higher productivity, more savings and more productive investment. For example, fertility declines accounted for one fifth of the economic growth in East Asia between 1960 and 1995.

The new evidence should strengthen the consensus around population and development reached in 1994. It should ensure that reproductive health information and services are recognized as essential for meeting the Millennium Development Goals adopted in 2000, including the aim of reducing extreme poverty by half by 2015. Seven of the eight goals are highly sensitive to success in broadening access to reproductive health services.
And it should remind international donors that reproductive health programs need and deserve funding. External assistance for these essential programs is still less than half the required level.

The report recalls that half the world, more than 3 billion people, live on less than $2 a day, and 1 billion live on less than $1 a day. Poverty is more than a lack of income: it is also insecurity and inequality. Poor health, including poor reproductive health, and illiteracy are poverty's companions and abettors. The wide gap in nearly all societies between the richest and the poorest challenges us to ensure that future progress is equitable, which depends in part on greater social investment.

Fertility and population growth are highest in the 49 least developed countries. Their population is projected to triple in the next 50 years, from 600 million to 1.8 billion. Effective population programs will help these countries and their people escape from poverty and insecurity. They will also combat inequality.

Effective programs are directed in the first place to aims that are human rights and ends in themselves - universal health care including reproductive health information and services; universal education; moves towards women's empowerment and gender equality. These initiatives enable choice, and experience shows that choice invariably leads to lower fertility, smaller families and slower population growth.

The same interventions will help poor people escape poverty in other ways. Education empowers both women and men. Better health removes one of the main sources of insecurity among the poor. Poor people themselves say that health is the key to well-being. Empowerment and gender equality liberate the potential of half the human race, the female half.

The report underlines the threat of the HIV/AIDS pandemic and its close ties with poverty. Poor people are especially vulnerable to HIV infection, for three reasons:

-The poor are more vulnerable to all health risks;-Poor people, especially women, lack the knowledge and the power to protect themselves;

- Young people in poor families and young people with no family support have the least access of all groups to information and services for HIV/AIDS prevention. Half of all new HIV/AIDS infections are among young people.

HIV/AIDS is a personal tragedy and a social disaster. It also holds back economic growth. Comprehensive reproductive health programmes are essential to preventing the spread of the infection. These programmes, therefore, are an urgent priority for many reasons: promoting development, avoiding further national catastrophes, improving the lives of the poor and meeting the international goal of halving poverty in the next 13 years.

For over 30 years, UNFPA has helped developing countries find solutions to their population problems. As the new report shows, we have in the process helped to build economic development and fight poverty. Our focus is on reproductive health in all its aspects, and we are one of the international leaders in the fight for HIV/AIDS prevention.

(This article is based on the statement by UNFPA Executive Director Obaid at the launch of the State of World Population 2002 report in London on December 3)