news

NEWS
Failed aid kills a million women
Sanjay Suri
Inter Press Service **************

More than a million women have died because rich nations have failed to honour their commitments to promote sexual and reproductive health, a group of NGOs said at the launch of a new campaign in London Thursday. About three-quarters of a million pregnant women and newly delivered mothers in the developing world died over the five-year period between 1996 and 2001, the groups say. But the total number will be considerably more in the ten years now since the developed countries made their commitment at the United Nations International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo in 1994, say the non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

The NGOs have come together in a campaign 'Countdown 2015' to call on governments to now meet their commitments. A delegation from sexual and reproductive health agencies including Marie Stopes International and Interact Worldwide presented a petition to the office of the British Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street. Simultaneous petitions were presented to governments Thursday by groups in Italy, Denmark and Germany. U.S. groups plan to hand over a petition to their government next week.

An analysis of government budgets by the U.S. based Population Action International shows that developed countries had made a commitment of 30 billion dollars for the period 1996-2001 over which the budgets were examined. The amount paid was a little more than 10 billion dollars, leaving a shortfall of almost 20 billion dollars. The Countdown 2015 NGOs figure the money that fell short could have prevented 268 million unwanted pregnancies, 113 million induced abortions, 7.2 million infant deaths and 733,000 pregnancy related deaths.

"The missing money has meant clinics without pills, without condoms, or even without such things as gloves and gauzes," chief executive of Interact Ros Davies told IPS. "We would have been in a far better situation if the governments had kept their commitments." One reason for the failure to keep commitments has been the generally declining levels of official development assistance, Davies said. "Also, a lot of the NGOs involved in this field are service providers, and therefore not very good at political lobbying and advocacy." But the time has come now for them to advocate the cause and push the case politically, she said.

U.S. policies have presented a particular problem. Under U.S. law passed by the Bush administration within the first week of President George W. Bush taking over, U.S. funding is denied to any agency that provides abortions, or engages in abortion counselling or referrals. "The funding is denied even to groups for activities like fighting HIV and AIDS if another part of the group engages in abortion services," Julia Ekong from Marie Stopes International told IPS.

The groups campaigning for more spending on reproductive health say the United States in effect achieved the opposite of what it had professed to, because it meant many more women resorting to illegal and unsafe abortions. The U.S. government that was due to spend 12. 3 billion dollars for sexual and reproductive health aid ended up spending about 4.1 billion dollars during the five-year period studied. That still meant that the United States paid 30 percent of its due, percentage-wise a good deal more than France which paid no more than three percent of what it was committed to for the period. Several European countries like Italy, Spain and Portugal have made similarly tiny contributions.

Other countries that fell short of their commitments include Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand, Portugal, Britain and Switzerland. Among these, Britain comes closest to meeting the target after paying 88 percent of its commitment of 2.3 billion dollars, according to figures released by the Department for International Development in Britain. The only countries that have paid their share in full are Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden.

Money on reproductive health is money well spent, said Davies. "Every dollar spent on reproductive health saves 16 dollars later on curative treatments on average." The 30 billion dollars committed is only a third of the total requirement estimated at the Cairo conference. The rest was to come from developing countries, which have produced a far greater share of their commitments than the developed countries. Much of the spending within developing countries has come from end users.

Increased spending on reproductive health is necessary immediately to meet the millennium development goal of sexual and reproductive rights for all by 2015, the NGOs say.

Source: Push Journal 2 July 2004