In 1994, at the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo, 179 governments pledged to improve women’s health and status. A decade later, 23 countries have made significant progress toward the health and reproductive rights goals but 17 countries have achieved little or nothing, or actually lost ground, according to a new report by NGOs.
ICPD at Ten: Where Are We Now?, is published by Population Action International (PAI), Family Care International (FCI) and the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF).
The report card first ranks larger countries on 13 indicators of reproductive health risk dividing the countries into five categories, from highest-risk to lowest-risk. For 62 countries with data on a smaller set of these indicators, ranking is based on their direction and pace of change.
Highlights of the report include:
Access to contraceptives has improved worldwide, but 123 million couples want to wait before having another child, yet cannot get access to effective family planning methods.
More women hold policy-making offices worldwide, but women are still under-represented in parliaments.
Much of the world has made significant progress toward gender parity in secondary school enrolment.
Despite some liberalisation of abortion laws, one in every ten pregnancies still ends in unsafe abortion?about 19 million per year. Unsafe abortion kills one woman every seven minutes.
The rate of adolescent pregnancy remains much the same as it was in 1994.
A woman dies every minute from the complications of pregnancy or childbirth. Little progress has been made since 1994 to save these women?s lives.
Many more women are in the formal workforce than in 1994, but they still earn less than men in most places.
HIV infection rates have increased exponentially since 1994 and in many countries, women now account for more than half of those infected.
Portugal is among the countries making litte progress on the goals, Denmark and Ireland did not produce sufficient data to be ranked.
More on the Countdown 2015 campaign to monitor progress on the Cairo goals.
