World needs greater investment in reproductive health education – UN agency

With half of the world’s population being younger than 25 and many of them being bombarded with sexually explicit media images, societies must increase funding for education and health, including sexual and reproductive health, the head of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) said today.

Launching the Fund’s report in London, Executive Director Thoraya Ahmed Obaid said, “The State of World Population 2003 report stresses that education, information and health services are urgently needed in all regions of the world. And I would like to stress that studies repeatedly show that sexuality education does not lead to promiscuous behaviour.

“We must also remember that many adolescents and young people are married. In some countries, most girls are married before the age of 18. Globally, there are 82 million girls, aged 10 to 17, who will marry before they turn 18,” she said. “Girls in their late teenage years are twice as likely to die during pregnancy and childbirth than are young women in their 20s.”

The trend towards later marriage in other countries was undermined whenever unequal power relations forced young women to accept unwanted sex or were unable to protect themselves against pregnancy or sexually transmitted infections.

Countries will not be able to reverse the spread of AIDS, reduce maternal mortality and reduce extreme poverty as called for in the Millennium Development Goals, unless greater investments are made in and for young people, Ms. Obaid said.

“Together, we must expand efforts to reach youth who are in school, who are living in the streets and those who are caught up in conflict zones, where the risk of sexual violence and HIV infection are alarmingly high.”

Present international funding for reproductive programmes had reached just 40 per cent of what governments pledged at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, Egypt, she said.

In 2001, that figure was $2.5 billion, the report said, yet estimates for seven Caribbean countries showed savings of $235 a year in direct and economic costs by delaying a single birth to an adolescent.

The benefit of each averted case of HIV was even higher – $34,600 per person for a poor country with annual per person earnings of just $1,000. The countries most successful in reducing HIV/AIDS were those whose leaders took the epidemic most seriously more than a decade ago, including Brazil, Jamaica, Senegal, Thailand and Uganda, the report said. But a study of 107 countries showed that 44 did not include AIDS education in school curricula.

Countries that have invested in education and health have benefited from reduced fertility and a temporary increase in the working age population, 15 to 60 years old, in proportion to younger and older dependents, the report said.

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