It is International Women's Day and Dr. Natalia Kanem, Executive Director of United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the United Nations sexual and reproductive health agency, is in Australia. What is the focus of her mission in Australia and what is UNFPA’s call to action to the Australian people?
It’s a pleasure to be able to celebrate International Women’s Day with the government and people of Australia, who have been so central to the success of gender equality and the sexual and reproductive health agenda over the past three decades. Australia is a key partner for UNFPA at global, regional and country levels, including across the Pacific. Together we save lives and help women, girls, families and communities to thrive. So it feels really appropriate to be here to celebrate this important day. We’re also marking the anniversary of the International Conference on Population and Development, which Australia committed to 30 years ago (ICPD30) and that placed human rights at the centre of an agenda advocating for broader consensus on universal sexual and reproductive health and rights. Finally, we’re here to say: Australia's partnership has been instrumental in achieving impactful results, especially with the flexible and sustained funding that they provide. Its role as a humanitarian leader has been pivotal, and without its support UNFPA wouldn’t have been able to achieve as much as it has. So our call-to-action for this week is: Let us deepen this partnership, so that more women and girls in the many challenging settings we work in can count on our support.
In her speech in February the Executive Director noted, “As we mark ICPD30 this year, we celebrate the hard-won gains since the conference in Cairo. More importantly, it’s an opportunity to rally diverse new allies and new ICPD champions, and together push for greater action to make the promise of Cairo real for the millions of women and girls who are still waiting”. Is there a rollback of women's rights, and do you think Australia is a champion of these rights and will this be part of the conversation with Australia and other member states of the region?
On women’s rights, the glass is half full and half empty. Over the past three decades, we have made much progress, but we are seeing attempts to curtail reproductive rights everywhere. And gender equality is projected to be attained in only 300 years... We have a long way to go, especially as the increasing number of crises puts women’s lives and rights at greater risk. Even though global maternal mortality rates dropped by 34 per cent between 2000 and 2020, still every two minutes a woman dies giving birth. In thirty years, the number of women using modern contraception has doubled, and yet over 250 million women who want to avoid pregnancy don’t use modern contraception, and nearly half of all pregnancies are unintended. Violence against women affects nearly one in three women worldwide. So we’re here to discuss where we’ve seen progress while looking at the road ahead of us. With committed partners like Australia on our side, we believe we can push back on the pushback. And we’re convinced that ICPD30 presents a pivotal opportunity to forge a more extensive and cohesive feminist movement – to push forward. Women's rights are under threat, but we will never go backwards.
Can you give examples of work you have undertaken together with Australia with any identifiable outcomes?
Australia is the biggest donor to the sexual and reproductive health work of the UNFPA Pacific Sub-Regional Office, based in Fiji and serving 14 Pacific countries. Australia provides UNFPA flexible funding that helps us buy the contraceptives and health supplies women need in developing countries and humanitarian crises around the world, including in the Pacific. Specifically, Australia has committed AUD 42.5 million for the second phase of the Transformative Agenda programme, to eliminate unmet need for family planning and improve sexual and reproductive health in nine countries over the next four years.
In the first phase of the programme we trained 420 healthcare workers on rights-based, client-centred family planning covering 231 health facilities across the six countries the programme initially covered. Globally, our work with Australia is successful. Just to give you an indication, in one year we have prevented more than 409,000 unintended pregnancies and reached more than 65,000 women and girls with sexual and reproductive health services. This is just an estimation of what we’re able to do with sustained investments.
Humanitarian assistance - can you give examples for women and girls during emergencies in the Pacific?
The Pacific is a region particularly vulnerable to climate change, isolation, and lack of investment. There is a limited overall access to sexual and reproductive health information and services due to the geographic challenges. The region’s vulnerability against external shocks, such as climate crises and health pandemics makes it all the more vulnerable. In the Pacific region, we responded to four major emergencies, reaching over 13,000 women and girls with sexual and reproductive health and protection services. We have worked with partners to establish safe spaces, and to deploy midwives in Fiji and Vanuatu. We distributed dignity and menstrual kits to women and girls in need. Australia’s humanitarian support does not limit to this unique region.
The Australian Government is also one of UNFPA’s longstanding partners in Afghanistan, where every two hours, a mother dies because of preventable pregnancy and child-birth related complications. UNFPA is delivering on the ground to ensure that every Afghan woman and girl has access to maternal health services and psychological support. We have mobile health teams there, travelling around villages, screening pregnant women, providing maternal health care. Our family health houses support safe births in hard-to-reach areas, where 26,000 women give birth each month. Australia is also a supporter of our response in Syria, Turkiye, Ukraine, to the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh and in other humanitarian emergencies.
Over the years, UNIC Canberra has spoken to UNFPA regional representatives in the region, in Papua New Guinea and elsewhere, who tell of pregnant women who sometimes need to walk miles to a clinic or ride in open boats to reach care. How is UNFPA assisting these women?
Since 2018, largely with the support of Australia, UNFPA has decentralized its training capacity for health workers – including in family planning, obstetric and gender-based violence prevention and response – to reach women and girls in the most remote parts of the Pacific. As a result, in Samoa, Tonga and Tuvalu, every single health facility has now a dedicated health worker trained in family planning or emergency obstetric and newborn care. In the Marshall Islands, UNFPA is training female health providers to dispatch them to each atoll of the country to provide services to women and girls who face barriers in accessing care from male providers. That’s one example of how we reach the furthest behind.
UNFPA's work in the Pacific is within one of the most diverse, expansive and remote regions of the world - how does UNFPA know how many people need assistance - or how to align its policies to assist the people of the region?
At UNFPA, we have the necessary tools to monitor sexual and reproductive health trends across Pacific Island countries. Through regular assessments, we evaluate the accessibility and quality of essential sexual and reproductive health and maternal health services, including necessary supplies and equipment, as well as the number of women who can access these services. That’s how we get to understand where the gaps are, and how we can work with partners to fill those gaps.
Photo: Executive Director Dr Natalia Kanem outside the Women's Health on Wheels (WhoW) mobile birthing facility funded in partnership with the Australian Government