Mr Chairman,
Distinguished Ministers,
Mr Federico Mayor, Director-General of UNESCO,
Ladies and Gentlemen,

First of all let me convey to you warmest greetings on behalf of the United Nations Secretary-General. He considers the work of the Congress extremely important, and would like to wish you all success in your deliberations.

Let me say a word of thanks to Mr Mayor for his highly educational treatise on population issues, and for his kind words about UNFPA and my own work. We at UNFPA truly value your strong commitment to population and your guidance in shaping our teaching and training efforts. Without UNESCO's expertise and pioneering spirit, population concerns could not have been introduced so effectively into the educational setting.

May I take this opportunity also to convey our deep sense of gratitude and appreciation to the Government and people of Turkey, for their generous hospitality and kindness. I have been visiting senior Government leaders in Ankara for the last couple of days and I know from my conversations with them that they are fully cognizant of the urgency of population issues and, in particular, of the importance of this Congress.

This Congress marks the coming of age of population education. It grew from cautious beginnings in the early 1970s, when a few countries introduced the subject. Today, more than 100 countries include population education in their school systems. Population has become one of the most popular educational innovations of our time.

Population education is closely adapted to its social surroundings. Its content responds directly to the needs and everyday experience of students. It is quick to pick up emerging trends and concerns. As the demographic situation, the health profile and the social attitudes of a country change, so does the content and the approach of population education.

Topics of such social and individual relevance cannot be taught through traditional techniques. Population education needs active exchange between teacher and learner; and it strengthens skills in solving problems and making decisions. In drawing directly on human experience, population education makes an essential contribution to students' skills in meeting life's daily challenges.

The Demographic Background

Today we know much more than we did ill the 1970s about the complexities and the interactions of population issues. Growth is still the dominant feature; annual additions are bigger than ever before, and will continue to grow throughout the rest of the century. We will be adding one billion people to our numbers every eleven years.

Growth rates, however, vary widely: in east Asia and in the Caribbean they are 1.3 per cent; compared to 1.8 per cent for Latin America, 2.2 for south Asia and over 3 per cent in most parts of Africa.

These variations affect other demographic indicators. As growth rates slow, the increasing proportion of the elderly is emerging, as a concern in some east Asian and Latin American countries. In Africa, high fertility and population growth is combined with economic stagnation to produce very rapid urban growth. Latin America's past rapid growth has produced highly unbalanced spatial distribution and growing environmental problems. Increasing demographic and economic differences between developing and industrialized countries are producing greatly increased international migration.

At the same time, specific problems are emerging which are common to all areas. Among these are teenage pregnancy and the growing threat of AIDS.

Population, Resources, Environment and Development

Mr Mayor has skillfully outlined the many linkages between population growth, environmental damage, resource depletion and the persistence of widespread poverty. The fact is that many developing countries simply cannot meet the needs of rapidly growing populations. They cannot provide adequate access to safe water and sanitation, nor can they provide food, shelter, education or employment for expanding numbers of people. Their attempts to do so draw of resources from productive investment.

These global trends have a profound and sometimes devastating impact on personal life. Development initiatives in recent years have stressed the need to focus on the individual as a the foundation for economic growth. Agenda 21 - the Earth Summit's action plan for sustainable development - includes meeting individual human needs as one of its top priorities. Agenda 21 set detailed goals in the areas of health, human settlements, water and sanitation, combating poverty and stabilizing population increase.

Such an emphasis calls for renewed attention to the social investments which produce more fully developed individuals. These investments include education, material and child health care, family planning services and measures to improve the status of women. An educated and healthy population is a country's best asset for achieving sustained and sustainable development.

The Gender Dimension

Critical in this context are special efforts to improve the role and status of women, and in particular to increase female school enrolment. The World Conference on Education for All, which gave strong attention to gender issues, discussed an interesting finding of recent research: even among countries with similar per capita incomes and similar investments in the social sector, countries which have closed the gender gap in education have better indicators of social welfare, including more use of modem family planning, better birth spacing and smaller families.

Lack of access to education on the other hand limits women's access to employment, social services and decision-making positions. For each individual woman, this constricts her rights and her autonomy as a human being. For society, it means neglecting 50 per cent of its human resources.

Experience and research show that women's education is one of the strongest factors influencing maternal and infant mortality. It also has a close connection with the decision by women to plan the size and spacing of their families. In all societies, the more highly educated the woman, the smaller, and healthier, is her family. Education makes women stronger and more confident in dealing with the world. An educated woman can make her own decisions, among them whether she wishes to become pregnant or not. An educated woman asks questions, among the most important being where she can find reproductive health and family planning services.

Population education helps to correct gender disparities. Population education explores a wide range of topics with close links to the status and role of women: family welfare and sex education, health and nutrition, human ecology and demographic trends.

One of the most important functions of population education is to provide specific information about reproductive health, so that women know the right questions to ask. In the short term, such information will help reduce the rates of teenage pregnancy, a growing problem in many of our countries. It is also a vital channel for education and information about the prevention of AIDS.

In the long term, population education stimulates change in gender roles and stereotypes. Countries have started to address the need for new concepts to deal with gender issues, and UNESCO has been doing pioneering work in this area in Latin America. If a new generation - of men as well as women - can be brought up to discuss gender disparities and understand their impact, we might finally see the elimination , of discriminatory practices. And by teaching responsible parenthood to both sexes, population education can create an environment where women's decisions about their reproductive preferences are respected.

Teaching these vital concepts cannot wait until values and attitudes are set. Teaching has to begin while children are in their formative years. Population education has an important role in introducing these concepts to young learners.

The Next Stage

We need to redouble our efforts now to make certain that population education carried out effectively in classrooms throughout the world. Every major curriculum reform, teacher training initiative and textbook revision should include attention to population education.

Other types of educational innovation complement and reinforce population education. The Earth Summit, for example, stressed the importance of environment education to raise awareness of the need to protect our habitat. The next step is to integrate these concepts into national life in a coordinated and complementary fashion. Such approach--for example, by introducing population education in the curriculum at the ti of national education reform--would help to institutionalize these important new discipline

The 1994 Conference

Your conclusions at this Congress will provide important inputs to the International Conference on Population and Development next year. All the expert-meetings and regional conferences leading up to 1994 have stressed the importance of information and education activities. They are the backbone of all other efforts in population, because they en people to make informed, independent choices.

Population education is not spectacular; it attracts little public attention. It is by nature a low-key, long-term endeavour, with a horizon of years and a focus on generations to come. It takes tenacity to develop curricula and teaching materials, to train educators, to test new methods, and to involve local communities. But it is the kind of work that yields the best results. Once we have travelled the road and can look back, we see fruits of such efforts in the knowledge and behaviour of our children.

Last year, UNFPA organized a global poster contest for school children of differ age groups. We were asking them to paint for us images they associate with population issues. The response was overwhelming. In the number of submissions we received fr all over the world, and in the quality of the paintings, even by the youngest participants saw a truly sophisticated understanding of population dynamics and their impact on the environment. The contest showed better than many technical evaluation missions what can be achieved through 20 years of promoting population education. These children were taught through the efforts of many ministries represented here at this Congress. We can take pride in their achievements.

We need to keep strengthening the integration of population and other socially relevant concerns into formal and non-formal educational systems. That is our gr opportunity for influencing the attitudes of the next generation. I trust that, in your deliberations this week, you will provide us with new ideas and suggestions for doing so. By educating young people for responsible interaction with their social and natural environment we help them solve the problems of the 21st century.