"A rich man said: 'Tell us about giving.' And he answered, 'you only give a little because you give of your assets. It is when you give of yourself that you are truly giving!"' And "What is fear of poverty, if not poverty itself?" I would have liked to have been able to write these two sayings of Khalil Gibran myself.

When I was asked to become Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), I wanted to accept immediately, before asking two essential questions and finding out whether I was capable of this assignment. What would my role be? To react, to be useful, to participate in specific activities, to put my fame as an actress in the service of women's causes--which is always better than the opposite!

And why work specifically with women? Because they are the ones who often bear the brunt of poverty and a lack of access to care and education; it is also because I see them as sources of hope for the future. Figures can be very dramatic; they indicate the importance and urgency of any given situation. And behind these numbers are faces and people and the suffering of entire families.

More than 1.5 billion people live on less than a dollar a day, and more than 1 billion women have no access to reproductive health services. Clearly, that means that they have no access to methods of family planning, to information on preventing sexually transmitted diseases and HIV/AIDS, and to health care during pregnancy and childbirth. As a direct result, about 515,000 women die each year of complications of pregnancy or childbirth. That means one woman every minute. What is incredible is that not enough people are talking about this phenomenon. In effect, it is not linked to a specific event; it is just something that happens daily. Someone told me recently that these deaths are the equivalent to having four jumbo jets full of women crashing every day. The emergency is real.

At my appointment ceremony, I spoke of the 515,000 women who die each year, but I did not even mention the 7 million who will survive but suffer serious health problems, and the 50 million who will suffer some health consequences after childbirth. Also, I did not mention the millions of children who will be born dead or will die in their first week of life. These deaths are the direct consequences of the state of neglect facing pregnant women--a state that can be rectified.

Local non-governmental organizations (NGOs), many of them supported by UNFPA, are working in most developing countries to provide access to health care for families that lack such services. When I spoke of women as factors of hope for development, I was thinking of those who are organizing to train others to help them earn a little money and help each other.

In my view, education is essential for women's advancement. But three quarters of a billion illiterate people in the world are women, and about 113 million children, most of them girls, do not always have access to education.

How, then, can we speak of prevention or even of economic prospects? By tolerating this situation, we are, in fact, excluding them from development. What is more, about 350 million couples lack access to modern methods of family planning. As a result, abortion has unfortunately become a means of controlling fertility, even though it is illegal in many countries.

Every year, women must choose to space out and better control their pregnancies. Here again, we come to the issue of lack of education, as well as cultural, religious and economic systems that frustrate the exercise of women's rights. This is why I am committed to UNFPA and why I actively support the activities of the French NGO, Equilibres et Populations, which represents the Face to Face campaign in France and lobbies for health care and education in developing countries. Face to Face is an international campaign to publicize the plight of millions of women and youth denied basic human rights that are taken for granted in developed countries, especially access to reproductive health care and family planning services. Its goal is to increase global awareness that women's rights are human rights.

I will end by saying this: it is necessary to help circulate information and apply pressure on our leaders and the people who manage international assistance from industrialized countries in order that money can be better distributed and invested in health and education programmes in poor countries. I hope that such assistance will go directly to the local groups that are fighting to help women and stop their deaths as they try to give life.

I began with one quote, I will end with another: "Women, more than ever, are the future of men. It is up to us to ensure, every day, that men stop deciding the future of women on their own."