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DEVELOPMENT: More Funds Sought for ‘Forgotten MDGs’

Sanjay Suri

LONDON, Feb 3 2004 (IPS) - A new study calls for more resources to provide reproductive health care in order to meet the Millennium Development Goals.

“Gaps in sexual and reproductive health care account for nearly one- fifth of the worldwide burden of illness and premature death, and one- third of the illness and death among women of reproductive age,” says the report released in London Tuesday by The Alan Guttmacher Institute (AGI) based in the United States and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).

“These gaps could be closed and millions of lives saved with highly cost-effective investments,” says the report ‘Adding It Up’.

Given its title, the study is strong on statistics and projections. It figures that “closing the gap so that every woman at risk of unintended pregnancy has access to modern contraceptives would cost 3.9 billion dollars more per year, and would save the lives of an additional 1.5 million children annually.”

This would also lessen induced abortions by 64 percent, reduce illness related to pregnancy and preserve 27 million years of healthy life, it says.

Providing contraception to women must be at the centre of the efforts, the report says.

“Lack of modern contraceptive methods is a violation of human rights,” UNFPA executive director Thoraya Obaid said at the launch of the report. But the budgets for contraception are “dramatically under-funded, and this has an impact on the well-being of families.”

More spending on sexual and reproductive health care will also bring social and economic benefits because “money spent on sexual reproductive health services will be repaid many times over,” Obaid said.

AGI president Sharon Camp said that studies in Latin America showed that “each dollar spent on contraception results in 12 dollars of health and education costs not needed.”

The report says sexual and reproductive health care underlies all the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) but its benefits are not explicitly mentioned “in part because many of the indirect benefits are difficult to measure.”

The report uses several studies and a variety of methodologies to indicate tangible economic and social benefits.

Sexual and reproductive health care contributes to greater opportunity for education for all family members, particularly girls, as families become smaller, the report says. It also leads to a healthier and more productive workforce with higher rates of savings and economic growth.

Such investment will lead also to higher levels of social and political participation and reduce public expenditure on maternal health problems, family subsidies and orphan care, the report says. Many of these benefits support progress towards the MDGs.

Sexual and reproductive health care “directly underpins goals 3 to 8 and indirectly affects achievement of goals 1 and 2,” the report says.

The first two of the goals that relate to eradication of extreme poverty and hunger, and achieving universal primary education will be supported because smaller families allow more investment in nutrition and health, and because smaller families can invest more in education, the report says.

The goals were agreed by world leaders at the United Nations Millennium Summit in New York in 2000.

The next four goals of promoting gender equality and empowering women, reducing child mortality, improving maternal health, and combating HIV/AIDS and other diseases will clearly be easier to achieve with greater stress on sexual and reproductive health care, the report says.

The seventh goal of ensuring environmental sustainability can be advanced by avoiding unwanted births and therefore helping to stabilise rural areas, the report says. The last stated goal of developing a global partnership for development can bring affordable prices for drugs to treat HIV/AIDS, the report says.

Developed countries have failed to meet the commitments made at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo that would advance progress towards the new goals, the report says. Consumers, governments and non-governmental organisations within developing countries are meeting most of their needs, it says.

In the year 2000, developed countries provided 2.6 billion dollars for such care services in developing countries, “less than half of what they had pledged at the Cairo conference for that year”. The report says 200 million women in developing countries “have an unmet need for effective contraceptives”.

The report offers statistics also on what can be achieved when contraception does become available.

It says that current programmes providing contraceptives to 500 million women in developing countries every year prevent 187 million unwanted pregnancies, 60 million unplanned births, 105 million abortions, 22 million miscarriages, 2.7 million infant deaths, 215,000 pregnancy- related deaths, and 685,000 children losing their mothers.