Clark for stronger advocacy

Countries have been asked to maintain their advocacy for girls and women’s basic sexual and reproductive health rights ‘at a high level’ for close to two more years so that it gets priority in the post-2015 development goals.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) administrator Helen Clark made the appeal on Thursday on the concluding day of the mega Women Deliver conference.

She observed societies ‘disempower’ girls and women only when they were denied “the most basic sexual and reproductive right, the right to control one’s fertility”.

The last day of the conference is focusing on the next development agenda after 2015.

Clark made the opening speech of a plenary, just hours before the UN Secretary-General’s appointed independent High Level Panel for post-2015 presents the report in New York Thursday afternoon.

As the report would be a crucial input to the ongoing discussions, Clark hoped that sexual and reproductive health rights, gender equality and girls and women’s empowerment would feature ‘prominently’ in it.

“Countries where women have rights and opportunity denied cannot maximize their development potential –that can’t happen if half the population is not equally empowered,” she said.

She said the MDGs has a lot of achievements , but still ‘unfinished agendas remained.

She said gender parity in primary and secondary school enrollments were closing, but lack of progress in cutting maternal deaths and achieving universal access to reproductive health were ‘well known’.

Still 800 women die every day from complications related to pregnancy and childbirth, she said terming it ‘a global emergency’.

“It is sobering indeed to see the highest death rates among the youngest mothers –among girls who did not get the chance to make other choices,” she said.

She said access to contraceptives and expert attention during child birth differ sharply between wealthier and poorer women.

“Young women have the least access to these services,” she said calling for equity.

Recalling her young age, the former Prime Minister of New Zealand said, “what a revolution it was for young women of my generation in New Zealand when modern contraception gave us the freedom to choose the lives we wanted to live”.

“My aspiration is to see every girl and every woman have that right and that freedom,” she said.

She called more women to secure positions of power in their country’s governments, legislatures and public administrations so that they can “use that power to advance the human development and rights of other women”.

She cited discussions in different levels in the run-up to the post-2015 development goals and said feedback from those consultations suggested that there was strong support for ‘achieving development with equity’.

“People are saying that they want the unfinished business of the MDGs attended to and there much unfinished business, not least in the areas of greater interest to this conference.

“There has been a strong call for a more transformational, universal and holistic agenda which does not place challenges in silos, but rather recognises the links between them”.

The conference largest of its kind in the decade brought more than 3000 delegates of over 150 countries for three-days.

It opened with a call to invest in girls and women’s health and rights that speakers said ‘a smart choice’ for future development.

Clark hoped that energies emanating from the massive conference in the Asian country Malaysia’s capital would help policymakers and rights activities of different countries to keep their voices at sustained high level.