POPULATION: Success Stories Need Backing, UNFPA chief says

By Feizal Samath Reprint | | Print |

Feizal Samath

COLOMBO, Oct 20 1997 (IPS) - United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) chief Nafis Sadik has urged developing countries that have succeeded in family planning and population control to fight their own battles in ensuring continuing overseas funding.

“… I think countries like Sri Lanka, Tunisia and the Mauritius should start to make a case for themselves …,” Dr Nafis Sadik, UNFPA Executive Director told IPS in an interview on Sunday during a three-day official trip to Sri Lanka.

She said that donor countries have been asked not to penalise countries that have the right social policies; instead they should be rewarded. “We should reward them by helping them to get to the level of maximum effectiveness,” she said.

Sadik was responding to criticism that donor agencies have cut funding to developing countries like Sri Lanka which because of its success in population programming were placed in a low-needs UNFPA category.

During a meeting with Sri Lankan non-governmental agencies, Sadik was told that the International Planned Parenthood Fund (IPPF) had sharply cut funding to the country’s Family Planning Association.

Sadik, who said there were no funding cuts but merely that priorities have been set for financial assistance and that more countries needed this assistance now, promised to talk to the IPPF and take up Sri Lanka’s case. The IPPF is participating in a conference here to discuss a range of issues on maternal health.

Sadik, a Pakistani national, is due to meet Sri Lankan President Chandrika Kumaratunga and other senior ministers during this visit to Colombo, her first as UNFPA head.

Sadik praised Sri Lanka for its achievements in population planning and, hailing it as a model for the Third World, said “most of the success was due to the government’s own efforts in having the right policies and investing in education and basic health services.”

Asked about South Asia success in this field, the UNFPA head said there was an uneven balance in the region which houses more than one billion people.

“South Asia differs a lot. Sri Lanka is very successful India has some success in some parts — more in the south and less in the north. Bangladesh is doing reasonably well while Pakistan, like Nepal, have fared poorly. These countries still have high levels of fertility and hence the region is uneven,” she said.

But Sadik noted that the fertility decline “and what we call the demographic transition” has begun and now it was a question of how to expedite this process in the world’s most populous region.

Reacting to cultural norms in South Asia which still make the sale or discussion of condoms an embarrassing issue, Sadik said that condoms’ use was associated with extra marital behaviour and sexual matters were rarely discussed.

“There is also a view in India and Pakistan that making these issues public and talking about it promotes a kind of sexual behaviour and norms which they are very reluctant to do. People there look at western behaviour as promiscuous. It is a religious, social or cultural thing … that there should be no sexual activity outside marriage and that’s the norm that societies want to preserve,” Sadik said.

Discussing the UNFPA’s Cairo conference, three years ago, on population and development and the course of action charted there, the UNFPA head said that many of the decisions were being put into action.

She said a recent U.N study found that developing countries were close to achieving the targets set at the Cairo meeting while developed countries were only halfway through in reaching their stated goals.

Sadik said that one of the biggest problems was the lack of resources especially from the international donor community and “we are making a big effort between now and 2000 to try to get more resources allocated for reproductive health and population programmes.”

She was happy with developed countries like the Netherlands and Denmark which have increased resources but lamented that the biggest two donors, the United States and Japan, and Germany had not raised their contribution levels. “If these three donors make a decision to do more I think we could be well on the way to implementing our goals.”

The UNFPA chief may quit her job later this year if she succeeds in clinching the top post at the World Health

Organisation (WHO). In any case, she says, the U.N secretary- general has set a rule that no one can stay over 10 years and “my present contract is up to 1999. So this means I would be leaving the UNFPA anyway.”

Sadik, whose name has been proposed by Pakistan for the WHO post in the U.N’s first-ever election of this kind, will be pitted against several others, mostly WHO regional heads, at the poll. U.N officials said an election was being held under the agency’s new strategy of openness and transparency.

In the past, heads of U.N agencies came from the ranks, just like Sadik, or through backroom canvassing of their favourites by the super powers. Sadik, who joined UNFPA in October 1971, said she was suited for the post because “I feel that my experience, my commitment and my energy allows me to continue with work and in the WHO I would have a wider mandate and a wider field …”

But she said that though a carefully-laid criteria had been set for the election, political considerations would still play a key role in picking the “winner”.