REGIONAL PARLIAMENTARIANS WORKSHOP FOR THE ARAB WORLD

The Forum of African and Arab Parliamentarians on Population and Development (FAAPPD) is organising a Regional Parliamentarians Workshop for the Arab World to take place in Amman, Jordan in February 2001.The Workshop is expected to focus on population challenges of the region, population and development concerns, reproductive health, women’s empowerment and youth. The Workshop is expected to be attended by parliamentarians from at least 17 Arab states of Africa and Middle East and other invited partners in population and development in the region.

This will be the Third Regional Workshop of its kind to be organised by the Forum as a follow-up to the ICPD+ 5 Review Forum at the Hague, Netherlands on 8 to12 February 1999. Previous workshops were: Eastern and Southern African Parliamentarians Regional Workshop on Reproductive Health Rights and Legislation, Kampala, Uganda, 27 to 29 September 1999; and Western African Parliamentarians Regional workshop on Harmonisation of Legislation and Rights in Reproductive and Sexual Health, Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire, 6-9 June 1999.

PARTNERS SUPPORT TO FAAPPD

The Partners in Development based in Dhaka has provided support for The Forum of African and Arab Parliamentarians on Population and Development (FAAPPD) based in Senegal for their publication programmes.

PARLIAMENTARIANS STUDY TOURS

During the months of September Nigerian Senate Committee on Population; and the Cameroonian Parliamentary Committee on Population and Development visited Senegal.

Leading members of south Africa’s ruling party who have been infected with HIV are receiving expensive cocktail of anti-viral drugs that are denied to ordinary people, including pregnant women and rape victims, reports the Sunday Times.

MPs from the national and provincial legislatures are members of Parmed, a private medical scheme which introduced an "Aids for Aids" provision last July. The clinical guidelines allow HIV-positive MPs and their dependants to be treated with drugs worth up to about US$ 5,000.

The Sunday Times reports that 68 members of the scheme are already being treated for HIV or AIDS. Since two-thirds of all national and provincial legislators are from President Thabo Mbeki’s African national Congress (ANC), it can be estimated that about 46 of these sufferers are from the party’s ranks.

The contrast between the growing shambles of a public health system facing collapse under the impact of Aids and the care available to a privileged elite could hardly be sharper, the report says.

GUIDE TO EUROPEAN POPULATION ASSISTANCE

The "Guide to European Population Assistance" has been developed by German Foundation for World Population together with leading European Population and Family Planning Institutions from the government and non-governmental sector. It provides a practical overview of European government funding lines, specially in the field of sexual and reproductive health, including family planing and HIV/AIDS, population and sustainable development.

• Describing European funding possibilities both from the European Commission and from 15 European countries,
• Enabling a better understanding of relevant guidelines and procedures,
• Allowing to improve proposal quality,
• Clarifying European governmental funding systems and structures

• Donor country profile; a short statement on the financial population assistance of each of European countries and of the European Commission
• Funding programmes; all available funding instruments for population assistance with data required to decide to pursue a funding source-address, financial data, funding priorities, application procedures, contact names and key officials
• Range of Indexes; the guide helps you to find the donors that support specific subject fields, award grants in geographic areas and provide the type of grant sought.

The Guide is free for NGOs in development countries (Euro 40/USD 37 for Northern NGOs) and can be ordered from the Deutsche Stiftung Weltbevoelkerung / German Foundation for World Population-Goettinger Chausssee 115-D-30459 Hannover-Germany, E-mail: mailto:guide@eurongos.org.

DSW’S PRESS TOUR OF CAMBODIA

Deutsche Stiftung Weltbevoelkerung (DSW), Hannover, will organize a press tour which will take place from 22nd to 29th November 2000. Thirteen national and international journalists from Bangladesh, Belgium, Cambodia, France, Germany, India and the United Kingdom will be visiting the EC/UNFPA Initiative for Reproductive Health (RH) in Asia projects in Phnom Penh and Battmbang. The journalists represent a wide variety of newspaper, magazines and radio stations, such as Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, De Standard, Daily Ittefaq, BBC, and South China Morning Post.The main purpose of this study is to raise the awareness of RH issues within a broad audience, in the main donor countries (whose financial aid has fallen far behind the originally promised sums during ICPD) and also in South East Asia.

For further information contact Ms. Caroline Jane Kent, RHI Press and Media Contact – DSW at caroline.kent@dsw-hannover.de.

Europe

MP’S HOLD PARLIAMENTARY HEARINGS ON FEMALE GENITAL MUTILATION (FGM)

The All-Party Parliamentary Group on Population, Development and Reproductive Health, UK, held hearings in Parliament on Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) in May 2000. The hearings covered issues such as awareness, training and effective ness of legislation on FGM in the UK and abroad. A number of expert witnesses have given evidence, including representatives from UNFPA, Wallance Global Fund, Washington, France, Belgium, Sudan, Senegal and Sierra Leone.

Ms. Christine McCafferty, MP, Chair of the group said: "It is estimated that over 130 million girls and women have undergone female genital mutilation, and that 2 million girls are at risk of undergoing some form of procedure each year… Government involvement is crucial. In the past few years’ laws have been passed in a number of countries against FGM. However, it is vital that these laws are implemented and that governments and agencies work together for the elimination of this practice."

BRITISH HOUSE OF LORDS DISCUSS REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH CARE

The British House of Lords was the place for extensive debate on British funding for Reproductive Health Care to NGOs, Hon. Viscount Craigavon asked the Government "How their aim of universal access to Reproductive Health Care id affected by the recent reduction in the propotion of funding to NGO projects.

EURO PARLIAMENTS TO VISIT KENYA

The Euro Parliamentarians Group on Population and Development has been reconstituted after the new election of the European Parliament in Strasbourg. Thirty-six new members from all political groups have joined. They are planning to send a Euro parliamentary delegation to Kenya. Mr. Erik Palstra of UNFPA, Geneva Office, is providing support to both the groups in Europe.

Experts at an international water conference recently warned that demand from a fast growing world population was reducing rivers to a trickle and threatening agriculture.

"Water scarcity is probably the most underestimated emerging issue today," Worldwatch Institute President Lester Brown told more than 800 delegates in his opening address at the 10th Annual Stockholm Water Symposium.

"Water has been an abundant resources and an essential free resource so we take it for granted," he said. "We now know we can’t do that anymore."

A forum on sexual and reproductive health in the context of development took place recently in the Portuguese Parliament, hosted by the Parliamentary Committee for Parity, Equal Opportunities and the family, and supported by the Portuguese FPA. Presentations at the first session were made by the Ministers of Health and education and the Chair of the Committee for Parity, Equal Opportunities and the Family as well as the president of the Portuguese FPA.

Keynote speakers included Alphonse MacDonald (UNFPA Geneva), Dilys Cossey (IPPF European Network), Manuela Sampaio (Portuguese FPA), Beatriz Calado Ministry of Health, Antonio Amado Vaz (Executive Director of the San Tome FPA), and Antero Veiga (IPPF Africa Region). The audience included MPs, civil servants, NGOs, representatives from FPAs, and parliamentarians from Brazil, Timor, Angola, Mozambique, san Tome, Cap Verde and Guinea Bissau.

DR. BRUNDTLAND ADDRESSES THAI PARLIAMENTARIANS

Bangkok – Dr. Gro Halem Brundtland, Director General, World Health Organization (WHO), Geneva, addressed the Joint Meeting of the Committees on Public Health, Thailand, at the Thai Parliament House, under the chairmanship of Prof. Dr. Prasop Ratanakorn, Secretary General of the International Medical Parliamentarians Organization (IMPO) and Adviser of Senate Committee on Public Health, Thailand.

Participants included Dr. Prasit Pitulkija, Chairman, Senate Committee on Public Health, Thailand; Dr. Boonpun Kae-Watana, Chairman, Committee on Public Health (Lower House), Thailand; Dr. Malinee Sukavejworakit, Vice-Chairman, Senate Committee on Public Health, Thailand; interested parliamentarians from Upper and Lower Houses; Dr. E. B. Doberstyn, WHO Representative to Thailand, and WHO officers.

20 years of dedicated service; many achievements, says The New York Time

When Dr. Nafis Sadik, an obstetrician from Pakistan, joined the United Nations Population Fund more than 20 years ago, family planning in the developing world was largely something bureaucrats foisted on poor women who were targets for meeting fertility-control quotas. "The world has come very far since then," said Dr. Sadik, who, by 1987, had become the fund’s executive director. Quotas and targets are gone. So is some of the squeamishness about sex. And "population control" is no longer an acceptable description of what family planners do.

Dr. Sadik, who will retire at the end of the year, has presided over a social revolution. Working with independent family planning organizations, women’s groups on every continent and many governments, she and other increasingly powerful women in the United Nations system have turned the debate over how to cut population growth into a campaign for women’s rights.

"If women had the power to make decisions about sexual activity and its consequences," says the new annual report of the population fund, "they could avoid many of the 80 million unwanted pregnancies each year, 20 million unsafe abortions, some 750,000 maternal deaths and many times that number of infections and injuries."

"They could also avoid many of the 333 million sexually transmitted infections contracted each year," says the report, titled "Lives Together, Worlds Apart: Men and Women in a Time of Change." The report says that the needs of women are often "invisible to men" and that until discrimination against women ends, the world’s poorest countries — where women are also often the most oppressed — cannot develop to their potential.

Here are some of the statistics from the report:

• One woman a minute dies of pregnancy-related causes.

• Sexually transmitted diseases afflict five times more women than men.

• An estimated two-thirds of the 300 million children without access to education are girls, and two-thirds of the 880 million illiterate adults are women.

• Ninety-nine percent of the approximately 500,000 maternal deaths each year are in developing countries.

• The message that women must be able to make more decisions about their lives is not welcomed by every government and culture, and not only in the developing world or among Islamic nations. As the United Nations began to move in the mid-1980’s toward more unambiguous support for women’s rights, in which it included the right to seek a safe abortion, the American Congress dealt the population fund — which now has an annual budget of $250 million — heavy financial blows.

In an interview to The New York Time, Dr. Sadik said her successor will have work to do, but at least will be able to do it in a new atmosphere of frankness.

"The most difficult issues of behavior or practices like rape, incest, female genital mutilation, the idea of female reproductive rights – all these concepts we would never have been able to discuss just a few years ago," Dr. Sadik said. That sexual violence, the sex trade, AIDS and other issues like the need to provide adolescents with information and services to promote safe sex can be talked about openly in the United Nations and government offices "is an indication of massive, massive change in
thinking," she said.

Many women’s health experts say that the most significant shift of gears came at a 1994 conference in Cairo, which Dr. Sadik directed.

"That came from my experience in Pakistan," she said. "When I worked in obstetrics, I found that when you told women, ‘You must plan your next birth at least two years later,’ they would say: ‘Not for me. I must have a son.’ They were so anemic, so ill — and yet they had no control over their lives.

"I remember making speeches in 1975 saying unless women had rights to control their own fertility they would have no other rights." Dr. Sadik, 71, said her Muslim upbringing and her background in the developing world have enhanced her credibility in dealing with reluctant or suspicious governments and societies. She was born in 1929 in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, before the partition of British India in 1947 into Muslim- and Hindu-majority nations. She was educated in medicine and public health in Calcutta, Karachi and at the Baltimore City Hospital and Johns
Hopkins University. She still wears an Indian sari rather than a Pakistani shalwar-kamiz.

In her work, she has encouraged developing countries to look at population growth in connection with economic trends.

Dr. Sadik also has tried to avoid emotional debates over cultural values by casting practices like female genital mutilation — the cutting of all or part of female genitals, often in very young girls — as a public health issue. "My view always is that culture and values are supposed to be helpful to societies," she said. "Not to discriminate. Not to subjugate. Not to perpetuate practices that are going to be harmful."

Courtesy: Popmedia

Message from AFPPD

Dr. Nafis Sadik was one UN Agency Chief who has clearly seen the role of elected representatives and parliamentarians. She has given supports to the National, Regional and Global development, education, and motivation of parliamentarians which has become an effective movement and a path for other UN agencies to follow.

UP-COMING EVENTS 2000 - 2001

1) National Meeting of Parliamentarians on Population and Development in Beijing, China on 3rd to 4th November 2000

2) Asian Parliamentarians Meeting on Environment in Hydrabad, India on 13th to 16th November 2000 organised by Parliament of India and the Korean Parliamentary League on Children, Population and Environment (CPE)

3) First Meeting of Caribbean Parliamentarians on Population to form the Caribbean Forum of Parliamentarians in the Bahamas on 21st to 23rd November 2000

4) Launching Meeting of Inter-European Parliamentarians Forum on Population and Development in Paris, France on 4th to 5th December 2000

5) Indo-China Parliamentarians Meeting on reproductive Health in Phnom Penh, Cambodia on 6th to 8th December 2000

6) Executive Board Meeting of the Asian Forum of Parliamentarians on Population and Development in Bangkok, Thailand on 9th December 2000

Year 2001

1) AFPPD East and South-East Asia and PacificWorkshop on the Eliminataion of Violence Against Women in February 2001 (venue to be decided)

2) APDA – AFPPD Asian Parliamentarians Meeting in New Zealand I April 2001

3) Afro-Asian Parliamentarians Conference on Cooperation in Food Security, Water, and Population and Development

AFPPD OFFICIALS MEET IN TOKYO

Mr. Colin Hollis, MP (Australia), Secretary General of AFPPD, on his recent visit to Tokyo, met and discussed Parliamentarians Programme for Population in Asia and worldwide with Mr. Yoshio Yatsu, MP (Japan), Chairman of AFPPD, and Mr. Tasugao Hirose, Executive Director and Secretary General of the Asian Population and Development Association (APDA).

At the start of the new century poverty remains a global problem of huge proportions. Of the world’s 6 billion people, 2.8 billion live on less than $2 a day and one billion on less than $1 a day.