Population issues involve more than just numbers," says Dr. Nafis Sadik. They involve planning for existing people and for those as yet unborn. "We have to plan for their needs in education, in health, and in all sectors of development," she told Africa Recovery in early March.
This is why Dr. Sadik, Executive Director of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), strongly supports the social sector focus of the UN System-wide Special Initiative on Africa, as well as the inter-agency collaboration the Initiative requires.
Photo: UNFPA
Giving an example of the coordination the Initiative promotes, Dr. Sadik said she had just reached a new agreement with the World Bank for it to play a much stronger advocacy role on gender issues in its overall policy dialogue with governments.
UNFPA has declared Africa to be its highest priority area, says Dr. Sadik, and has increased funding allocations for its work there by 40 per cent over the last 10 years. It plans further increases to keep pace with local absorptive capacity.
The agency is moving ahead with the Programme of Action in Africa, drawn up to help countries move towards the goals set by the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) held in Cairo in 1994. These include include far better access to reproductive health care, a central concern for women.
In this context, UNFPA reports that 19 African governments have adopted comprehensive population policies and others are in the process of doing so. Examples include Botswana, Côte d'Ivoire, Mozambique, Namibia, Togo and Zimbabwe, where with UNFPA support governments established new national policies in 1997 and set up institutional structures for implementation. Kenya, Lesotho, Rwanda, Uganda and Zambia are working towards revising their population policy to incorporate ICPD recommendations. Swaziland and Angola are also working on their population policies and a time frame for implementation.
Photo: UN / B. Wolff
According to Dr. Sadik, UNFPA is very active in raising the profile of population and gender considerations in country-level efforts to implement the Special Initiative, particularly in the health and education sectors. UNFPA representatives take part in meetings of UN country teams to coordinate their programmes, providing input for investment and reform programmes in the health and education sectors. They are also working together to develop common situation analyses or compile baseline data for the Initiative's objectives. In Mozambique, for example, UNFPA helped ensure that demographic and reproductive health issues were factors in the analysis of social and economic conditions. And in Cameroon, UNFPA is involved in developing a database for important social indicators.
UNFPA is also helping countries to collect gender disaggregated data for planning, monitoring and evaluation. For example, UNFPA has helped Cameroon, Eritrea, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique and Tanzania to mobilize resources towards a census. And in 1996, UNFPA also helped with demographic health surveys in Botswana, Cape Verde, Chad, Eritrea, Rwanda and Senegal.
Through such activities, says Dr. Sadik, UNFPA is advancing the goals of the Special Initiative. By making population and gender issues a factor in their policy-making, African countries will be better able to tailor their resource mobilization and allocation to their most fundamental development needs, Dr. Sadik observes.
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