Women Convention – Jordan third/fourthperiodic report to CEDAW – Summary records (excerpts)

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Consideration of reports submitted by States Parties under Article 18 of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women

Combined third and fourth reports of States Parties

Jordan*

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* The present document is being issued without formal editing.

For the initial periodic report submitted by the Government of Jordan, see CEDAW/C/JOR/1, which was considered by the Committee at its twenty-second session. For the second periodic report submitted by the Government of Jordan, see CEDAW/C/JOR/2 which was considered by the Committee at its twenty-second session.

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Part III

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102. In general, education in Jordan is supervised in part by the Ministry of Education (which has responsibility for private schools and Government-run schools) and in part by UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. The budget of the Ministry of Education accounts for 11.39 per cent of the Government of Jordan’s total budget. There are 1,531.331 pupils in all, of whom 751,337 are girls; girls thus account for approximately 49.1 per cent of the total. Table 6 below shows the distribution of pupils by supervisory authority, level of educational institution, and sex.

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202. The third major health care service delivery agency in Jordan is UNRWA, which provides services for 63.8 per cent of its 1,740,000 registered Palestinian refugees. It is noteworthy, however, that only 18 per cent of those refugees live in camps in Jordan; most of the Palestinian refugees registered with UNRWA possess Jordanian citizenship, with all its attendant rights and duties. Accordingly, whether they live in the camps or not, those refugees are eligible for health insurance coverage and thus have access to the full range of health care services provided by the Ministry of Health, RMS, NGOs and the private sector. The services provided by UNRWA’s 23 primary health care centres are available to Palestinians living in the camps or elsewhere; they include dental clinics, family planning and maternity units, and X-ray laboratories. The personnel who staff those clinics number 902 in all. Some of them are women, but data on the numbers of women working in them suggest that women do not participate effectively in the Agency’s health care activities, as will be apparent from table 35 below.

Table 35

% women employed in UNRWA health care centres

Source: UNRWA (2004), Annual Report of the Department of Health 2003.

203. Statistics show that infant mortality rates among Palestinian refugees in Jordan are low by comparison with those observed in some of the neighbouring host countries: in 2003, the total infant mortality rate was 22.5 per 1,000 live births. The rate for male infants was 23.6 per 1,000 live births, slightly higher than the corresponding rate for female infants (20.8 per 1,000). For the under-3 mortality rate, no statistical breakdown by sex is available, but the total rate was also low, at 25.1 deaths per 1,000 live births.

204. UNRWA statistics also show that in 2003, 86.9 per cent of its pregnant clients visited a prenatal clinic at least four times, that 99.3 of them gave birth under medical supervision, and that 98.3 or them were delivered in a hospital. Sixteen cases of maternal mortality were recorded for all the host countries in 2003, including four in Jordan, and the maternal mortality rate for all areas served by UNRWA was 21.8 per 100,000 births. Other statistical data include a 32.1 per cent anaemia incidence rate among pregnant women in 1999 and a 99.3 per cent tetanus immunization rate in 2003. Lastly, 89.9 per cent of all women who gave birth in 2003 received postnatal care.

205. It should be noted that there are some minor disparities between the statistics relating to Palestinian refugees and those relating to Jordan as a whole. For example, in 2003 the fertility rate for the refugee population was 3.6, i.e. 0.1 point lower than the corresponding rate for the population of Jordan. In the year 2000, the age of marriage was also lower among the Palestinian refugee population at 20.3 years, compared to 25.9 years for the country as a whole in that year. Lastly, 25.1 per cent of Palestinian refugee women marry before reaching the statutory age of 18.

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