Partners in Population and Development

Article: Salome Donkor
THE right to sexual and reproductive health is central to human freedom and development. Promoting reproductive health and rights and the full human rights of women is vital to efforts to build a more peaceful, prosperous and stable world.
Ghana revised its National Population Policy in March 1994, prior to the United Nations International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) held in Cairo, Egypt, the same year to incorporate new emerging issues.
The National Population Council (NPC) has the responsibility to oversee the implementation of the revised national policy, which covers a wide range of population and related issues. The current focus of the NPC’s programme is fertility reduction and integration of population variables into development planning.
The centrality of the ICPD Programme of Action (PoA) and key actions to the achievement of internationally agreed development goals is a central agenda for sustainable development and the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
The programme of action adopted by the ICPD gave support to the concept of direct South-South co-operation to strengthen and deepen the impact and effectiveness of population and development programmes.
In line with these recommendations, 10 developing countries announced the establishment of Partners in Population and Development (PPD) as an inter-governmental vehicle for the promotion of South-South co-operation.
The PPD is an inter-governmental alliance with a current membership of 24 developing countries, including 14 African countries. It came into being in 1995 at its inaugural meeting in Harare, Zimbabwe, to promote South-South co-operation in the area of reproductive health and population and development and its secretariat is based in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Events organised by member countries have tended to promote better understanding and appreciation of the concept of South-South co-operation and strengthening national support for that co-operation in the areas of reproductive health, population and development.
The vision of the PPD is to drive the global reproductive health agenda to attain sustainable development by 2014 and to assist each member country and other developing countries to address successfully the sexual and reproductive health and rights and population and development challenges.
This is to be done through South-South collaboration by raising a common voice and sharing sustainable, effective, efficient, accessible and acceptable solutions considering the diverse economic, social, political, religious and cultural characteristics of our countries.
The focus areas of the PPD is to integrate MDGs and ICPD goals, promote reproductive health and rights, improve gender equality, strengthen the integration of reproductive health and HIV and AIDS, improving adolescent sexual and reproductive health and improving reproductive health.
Ghana became the 24th member of the PPD in 2008 and as part of efforts to strengthen South-South co-operation, the NPC, in collaboration with the PPD Secretariat, organised a national South-South support structure meeting in Accra. The meeting brought together stakeholders in reproductive health and population and development to discuss and map out modalities for the establishment of a national South-South support structure for Ghana.
In his address, the Executive Director of the PPD, Mr Harry S. Jooseery, said it was unfortunate that the funding of family planning programmes had fallen from 55 per cent in 1995 to seven per cent in 2005 which had hampered progress and plunged the populations of many developing countries into a situation of abject poverty, adding that in some parts of Africa family planning services were completely unavailable, while those services remained inaccessible in other parts where they were available.
He said it was true that some countries in Africa had recently achieved positive economic growth. However, there was a huge poverty gap existing between some African countries.
He touched on the rate of maternal mortality and mobidity in Africa, which he said was still the highest in the world, stressing that the average maternal mortality rate was 400 deaths per 100,000 live births and that it was more than 900 in some African countries.
He also said the use of contraceptives was 21 per cent in sub-Saharan Africa, while the world average was 59 per cent, adding that an estimated 22 million people were living with HIV at the end of 2007 and approximately 1.9 million additional people were infected with HIV during that year.
Mr Jooseery said with Ghana’s estimated HIV/AIDS prevalence rate reducing from 2005, with innovative programmes like “Stop AIDS, Love Life” Ghana was tackling the deadly disease in a timely manner, adding that the country had also made good progress in the achievement of the MDGs, since 2000.
According to him, healthy women whose human rights were protected could be fully productive workers and effective participants in their country’s political process, adding that only when women were healthy and empowered could they rise and educate healthy children.
To him, “these are the building blocks of stable societies and growing economies”, and pointed out that “in this time of economic uncertainty there is no more important investment to be made than investing in the rights of the women of our countries”.
The Executive Director of the NPC, Mrs Esther Apewokin, said the NPC had been involved in PPD programmes since 2007 when Ghana was invited to participate in the first partner country co-ordinators meeting of the Africa regional office in Kampala.
She said the NPC, in collaboration with the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) and with funding from the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), had developed training modules on integration of population variables into development planning and the modules had been used to revise some district plans.
She, however, mentioned that the inability of Ghana to generate local funding for population, health and development programmes, as well as inadequate resources to train more personnel, high attrition of staff in the district offices, low knowledge of computer application among budget and planning officers, was a constraint to integrating population variables into development planning.
In an address read on his behalf, the UNFPA Representative in Ghana, Mr Makane Kane, said the ICPD agenda declared 15 years ago was to be implemented within each country in partnership with governments, civil society organisations, traditional leaders, students, women’s groups and development partners.
He was optimistic that working together, the 24-member PPD would command a cumulative wealth of knowledge and experiences which, when shared, would lighten some of the intractable problems on societies.
Professor F.T. Sai, expert/consultant, Population, Development and Reproductive Health, who chaired the function, said it was important to appreciate the need to put the various policies into practice to realise the principles and purposes of reproductive health, population and development.