UN: Wealthy countries must donate billions more dollars to ensure women's reproductive rights and cut population growth, a United Nations report outlined yesterday.
If nations fail to keep their pledges, plans to balance the world's people with its resources and improve the status of women by 2015 may not be met, according to the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) report, State of the World Population 2004.
More girls in poor nations are being educated and more countries have policies to ensure their rights since the goals were set a decade ago at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo.
But over half a million women still die from pregnancy-related complications each year and the global population is growing, the report said.
"Even as the needs continue to mount, the response of the international community has been - to put it plainly - woefully inadequate," UNFPA executive director Ms Thoraya Ahmed Obaid told reporters.
Donor countries have given only about half the $6.1 billion a year pledged by 2005 and lack of funding is impeding progress.
"Quite a bit of progress has been made in the past 10 years but it is not as we had hoped it would be. We still have quite a way to go to reach the targets set for 2015," Ms Obaid said.
The UNFPA report marks the halfway point to the deadline set at the Cairo meeting.
"It is a call for governments to invest in the education, health and human rights of women and young people to ensure a more equitable and sustainable world," said Ms Obaid.
The report is a summary of surveys done in 160 countries to gauge their progress since the Cairo meeting.
It shows that many nations have enacted laws or policies to guarantee women access to family planning and protect them from domestic or sexual violence.
"Policies have been adopted but implementation is not as fast or as widespread as we would like it to be," said Ms Obaid.
Three-quarters of countries have national strategies to deal with HIV/AIDS and the use of contraception has increased from 55 per cent in 1994 to 61 per cent today. But that proportion falls to just 25 per cent in Africa. More than 350 million couples still lack access to a full range of family planning services.
There are about 200 million poor women in developing countries who still do not have access to effective birth control and huge gaps exist in the availability and quality of healthcare between rich and poor.
In the developing world, one-third of pregnant women receive no healthcare during pregnancy and only half of all deliveries are attended by a midwife or doctor, the report said.
The lifetime risk of a woman dying in pregnancy or childbirth in West Africa is one in 12, compared with one in 4,000 in industrialised countries, the report notes. In addition, there were an estimated 5 million new AIDS infections last year, 40 per cent in women and nearly 20 per cent in children.
Some 3 million people died of AIDS, including 500,000 children under 15.
While fertility is falling in many regions, the world population will increase from 6.4 billion today to a peak of about 8.9 billion by 2050.
"Although families are getting smaller in many regions, the 50 poorest countries will triple in size, to 1.7 billion people."
She believes that the fact that a woman dies every minute from a pregnancy-related complication is the most glaring indicator of the rich/poor health divide.