For policy makers and activists working for sexual and reproductive health and rights, it’s been a long road since the landmark International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) held in Cairo in 1994.

Back then, the abortion issue pitted groups against one another, even as frustrated activists tried to keep the spotlight on human rights and development. Still, the conference prepared the groundwork for international development goals, and 179 governments adopted an ambitious “programme of action”."It’s the other way around. Countries become wealthier when people have smaller families."

Twenty years later, policy makers can point to major achievements, but divisive issues remain, and the status of women is nowhere near where it should be, according to Dr. Babatunde Osotimehin, executive director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).

“We did change the paradigm around population and made it people-centred,” Osotimehin told IPS in an interview. “We have empowered women and girls to be able to make choices in their lives, we’ve reduced maternal mortality by more than 50 percent, we have lifted one billion people out of poverty, and we have more laws today protecting women than ever before.”

Osotimehin stressed, however, that there are still some 222 million women in mainly developing countries who would like greater access to contraception and other family planning tools, but are not able to get these for a variety of reasons.

In addition, almost 800 women still die every day from complications related to pregnancy and childbirth; and teenage pregnancy, child marriage and violence against women remain troubling issues around the world. Meanwhile, women’s involvement in the political sphere lags behind that of men in most regions.

Participating in the sixth International Parliamentarians’ Conference on the Implementation of the ICPD Programme of Action (IPCI/ICPD) Apr. 23-25 in Stockholm, Osotimehin told IPS that the UNFPA doesn’t “get into abortion” because the organisation respects the rights of sovereign states to make their own laws.

“But we insist that in countries where it is legal, it should be performed safely, and in those countries where it is not legal, they should have empathy and compassion so that post-abortion care is available,” he said.

The Stockholm conference took place amid controversial moves in Spain to pass some of the strictest abortion legislation in Europe. But the conference itself had a much broader agenda, focusing on gender equality, gender-based violence, and reproductive and sexual health and rights – including contraception, safe abortion and sexuality education.

“This is about human rights as well as economic development,” said Baroness Jenny Tonge, a member of the UK’s House of Lords and president of the Brussels-based European Parliamentary Forum on Population and Development, which organised the conference together with the UNFPA, the Swedish Parliament and other groups.

“The most important message is that we have to start with the individual. We have to make sure that women in particular are healthy, are being looked after, are not going to die in childbirth and, above all, do not have more children than they actually want,” she told IPS.

“We’ve seen the evidence and the statistics. People don’t have small families because their country has become wealthier. It’s the other way around. Countries become wealthier when people have smaller families. That’s why the message of contraception, family planning, good reproductive health and rights is so important to development,” she added.

A few parliamentarians seemed to have been sent to the conference by their governments without a clear view of the issues or objectives, but others said they were in Stockholm to take inspiration from the meeting and to effect change in their countries.

“This conference is important because a woman’s right to have access to sexual and reproductive health information is fundamentally important to development and even more so in middle-income countries,” said Kamina Johnson Smith, an opposition senator from Jamaica.

The island has a female prime minister, elected twice, but women still suffer from gender inequity, with female unemployment almost is twice the level of men’s, Johnson Smith said.

Like others in the Caribbean and Latin America, the country also struggles with a high rate of teenage pregnancy. So attending the conference and conferring with other delegates provides support in tabling certain measures in parliament, Johnson Smith told IPS.

The first day of the forum in fact saw sobering statistics about teenage pregnancy around the world: some 18 million girls up to the age of 19 become mothers every year, according to UN figures.

For Osotimehin and the UNFPA, part of the solution is to have “comprehensive sexuality education” for children and young people. “They should also have universal access to information and reproductive health services, including contraception,” he told IPS.

Surveys indicate that when these tools are available, the “need for abortion goes down,” Osotimehin added. He pointed to Sweden and the Netherlands as examples where youth-friendly centres and clinics provide counselling and other services, resulting in many young people being able to make informed choices.

“What I find is that some governments don’t have the courage to actually go and do what they need to do,” he said. “They don’t want to talk about sexuality education and they don’t want to talk about contraception. There is a need to elevate the conversation so that the reality of what we’re talking about effects action among governments, political leaders and community leaders.”

For Sweden, transparency and discussion of sexual and reproductive health is of paramount importance, said Ulrika Karlsson, MP and chairperson of the Swedish All Party Parliamentary Group on Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights.

“When I talk about such issues, sometimes people say ‘Oh, you’re from Sweden, it’s easy for you to talk’,” she told IPS. “But Sweden hasn’t always been as developed as it is now. In 100 years, we’ve gone from a poor country with high infant and maternal mortality to a country with almost zero maternity deaths, and we hope people can be inspired by our own journey.”

Three Crowns Rural School in South Africa is a leader in recycling, turning various waste into gas and fertiliser, and recycling its water. Above, the bio-digester. Credit: David Oldfield/IPS

By Thalif Deen
STOCKHOLM, Aug 29 2012 (IPS)

When the international community was struggling to ward off a potential decline in development aid in early 2000, it came up with a novel idea: a proposal for “new and innovative sources of financing”, including a tax on airline tickets and a levy on foreign exchange transactions.

The funding, mostly from the tax alone, first proposed at the 2002 U.N. conference on Financing for Development, has already generated over 11.7 billion dollars, according to the World Bank.

And now, the Swedish government has come up with a variation of that proposal: a new finance instrument called Water Innovation Challenge Fund (WICF) whose primary objective is to capture, promote and implement “innovative ideas and new technologies”  in water resource efficiency.

The proposal, announced at the international water conference in Stockholm this week, comes at a time when the United Nations has repeatedly warned of an impending water crisis in the next two or three decades.

Or as Alain Vidal, director of the Challenge Programme for Water and Food (CPWF), describes as “a perfect storm”  – food shortages, water scarcities and insufficient energy resources – collectively destined to hit the world by 2030.

Addressing delegates here, the Swedish Minister for International Development Cooperation Gunilla Carlsson said the new fund is also about finding new ways to sustainably intensify the use of water, land and energy in production to achieve equitable social, economic and environmentally sound development.

“Simply put, we need to create more with less. This to me is innovation at its best,” she said, pointing out that in a finite biosphere, achieving such a combination will require new thinking.

Asked for his expert advice, Dr. Colin Chartres, the director-general of the Colombo-based International Water Management Institute (IWMI), told IPS: “I am highly supportive of the Swedish minister’s proposal.”

“The more we can do to foster and encourage innovation in the water sector, the better,” said Dr. Chartres, the 2012 Stockholm Water Prize Laureate.

He added, “We can’t have water without using energy, and we can’t have energy without using water, and that an increased understanding of the water energy nexus, coupled with efficiency innovation in both sectors, is vital.”

Elaborating on her proposal, Carlsson said innovations have historically changed the lives of millions of people for the better. “Just think of vaccines, improved grain varieties and, more recently, the impact of mobile phones,” she pointed out.

The less well-known innovations are often found in the poorer countries, among large numbers of people surviving on very low incomes but who are very resilient and often creative entrepreneurs, she added.

“These innovations are often about crafting business solutions that are relevant to poor people and about making them available to the many. Low-cost mobile financial services and insurances are among the more recent ideas”.

Carlsson also said innovations have provided many new employment opportunities across Africa. Small affordable packages of improved seeds or fertilisers have reduced the barriers of upfront costs for poor farmers.

Some of the most important growth markets today are African and Asian. Increasingly, business is looking for innovative models building on local ideas and demand, rather than adapting products and distribution processes that were conceived for U.S. or European markets, she noted.

“If we can find similar innovations and scale up in a sustainable manner, the lives of millions of people, if not hundreds of millions, could improve,” Carlsson added.

The Rome-based International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) has been a leading proponent of innovative ideas relating to smallholder agriculture and rural development.

In a statement released here, IFAD says it supports practices that help poor farmers in developing countries to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their water use.

In Brazil, grey water filtration recycles washing water for agriculture, and integrated rice and fish production in South East Asia allows farmers to optimise water productivity.

In Madagascar, old flip-flop sandals were collected by otherwise unemployed people and used to make parts for micro-irrigation equipment.

Besides aiding irrigation, says IFAD, this activity promoted recycling and created jobs for street workers who collect old sandals and for the small businesses that produce the irrigation parts.

Carlsson said that “now more than ever, we need to encourage new thinking in our development assistance” and “reflect on lessons learned and find out whether and what we can do better”.

And one of the most important lessons has to do with partnerships. “It is clear to us that no one single actor can solve development challenges,” she added.

Perhaps two of the time-honoured technologies are wastewater treatment and desalination of sea water.

Asked about its potential, Dr Chartres told IPS:  “Given the cost of desalination and the large requirements for water and agriculture, I don’t see it as a current option, except in a few small niche environments.” But recycling, he said, was a different matter.

“Recycled water can be treated for purpose and it is an excellent way of using urban waste and nutrients,” he said.

And IWMI, which he heads, is currently working on the development business models to encourage more use of recycled waste water.

Meanwhile, Sweden prides itself as a country which inaugurated its first water treatment plant about 150 years ago. Gosta Lindh, managing director of Stockholm Vatten, says his company stands on the foundation that were laid more than a century and half ago.

In Stockholm, food waste and fat are basic raw materials for producing biogas. And inner city buses, garbage trucks and nearly 10,000 passenger cars and taxis are run on biogas.

“We are proud to be able to supply clean and fresh water to an ever-expanding Stockholm. We also take care of waste water and residual products in the most efficient way and reintroduce them to the cycle,” says Vatten.

And in Stockholm, he boasted, “we are proud to say we have world-class water.”

Paradoxically, the water we “eat” is likely to become one of the growing new dangers to millions of the world’s thirsty, hungering for this finite natural resource.

“More than one-fourth of all the water we use worldwide is taken to grow over one billion tons of food that nobody eats,” Torgny Holmgren, executive director of the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI), told delegates during the opening of the annual international water conference, World Water Week, in the Swedish capital Monday.

Torgny Holmgren, executive director of Stockholm International Water Institute, warns that more than a quarter of global water usage is spent to grow food that goes to waste. Credit: Thomas Henrikson, World Water Week/ CC by 2.0

“That water, together with the billions of dollars spent to grow, ship, package and purchase the food, is sent down the drain,” he said.

“And reducing the waste of food is the smartest and most direct route to relieve pressure on water and land resources. It’s an opportunity we cannot afford to overlook,” he added.

The conference, one of the world’s largest single gathering of experts on water and sanitation, has drawn more than 2,000 delegates, including senior U.N. officials, scientists, academics, water activists and representatives of the business community, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and the media, from over 100 countries.

Since everything humans eat requires water to be produced, the paradox of the water we “eat” was best illustrated by an exhibition in the conference lobby, which pointed out that the production of an average hamburger – two slices of bread, beef, tomato, lettuce, onions and cheese – consumes about 2,389 litres of water, compared to 140 litres for a cup of coffee and 135 for a single egg.

An average meal of rice, beef and vegetables requires about 4,230 litres of water while a chunky, succulent beef steak, a staple among the rich in the world’s industrial countries, consumes one of the largest quantum of water: about 7,000 litres.

Addressing delegates Monday, Dr. Colin Chartres, director-general of the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), said feeding over 9 billion people by 2050 is possible, “but we have to reflect on the cost to the environment in terms of water withdrawals and land resources”.

Furthermore, it will put phenomenal pressure on the ecosystem services on which society depends.

“Saving water by reducing food waste, increasing productivity, plant breeding and waste water recycling are critical to all of us,” said Dr. Chartres, the 2012 Stockholm Water Prize Laureate.

Jose Graziano da Silva, director general of the Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), said statistics show that agriculture is one of the largest consumers of water.

“But that also means that agriculture holds the key to sustainable water use,” he said, pointing out that investing in smallholder farmers is “critical to achieve food and water security for all people”.

Meanwhile a 50-page report by the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) released here points out that nearly one billion people still suffer from hunger and malnutrition – despite the fact that food production has been steadily increasing on a per capita basis for decades.

Producing food to feed everyone well, including the two billion additional people expected to populate the planet by mid-century, a significant from today’s seven billion, will place greater pressure on available water and land resources.

Entitled “Feeding a Thirsty World: Challenges and Opportunities for a Water and Food Secure Future“, the report focuses on the primary theme of this year’s conference: “Water and Food Security”.

Achieving food security, the report argues, is a complex challenge involving a host of factors. Two of the most critical have been identified as water and energy, both essential components to produce food.

Dr. Anders Jagerskog, lead editor of the report, said feeding everyone well is a primary challenge for this century. “Overeating, undernourishment and waste are all on the rise, and increased food production may face future constraints from water scarcity,” he said.

“We will need a new recipe to feed the world in the future,” he warned.