L-R: Dr. Surya Chandra Surapaty, Chairman, National Population and Family Planning Board of Indonesia (BKKBN); Purnima Mane, President/CEO, Pathfinder; Dr. Ariel Pablo-Mendez, Asst Administrator for Global Health, USAID; Dr. Awa Marie Coll Seck, Minister of Health & Social Action, Senegal, and Benoit Kalasa, Director of the Technical Division of UNFPA, during the official ICFP press conference on "Family Planning and the Sustainable Development Goals" at the opening of the ICFP 2016, in Nusa Dua, Indonesia on Monday, 25 January, 2016.
By Sola Ogundipe, reporting from Nusa Dua, Indonesia
Global leaders have called for greater investment and urgent action towards increasing access to family planning services worldwide, even as an estimated US$9.4 billion is required annually to meet all women’s needs for modern contraception in the developing world.
Making the call for more commitment to family planning initiatives, Monday, while addressing more than 2,500 attendees at the opening of the 4th International Family Planning Conference, ICFP, in Nusa Dua, Indonesia, government, health and development leaders from around the world, unanimously agreed that the way to truly ensure sustenance of family planning programmes is to mobilise funds locally.
Speaking at the event, themed “Global Commitments, Local Actions,”
co-hosted by the Bill & Melinda Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the National
Population and Family Planning Board of Indonesia, President Joko Widodo
of Indonesia, expressed a heartfelt commitment to the global advancement of maternal health and family planning practices built on the principle of informed choice:
“I
wish that at this ICFP, we can discuss the main foundations necessary
to build the planet that we want by 2030. A future that ensures all
women and girls are empowered to choose whether and when they want to
have children and space their births, so that mothers and their babies
have a better opportunities for better lives."
To
solve the issues of contraceptive discontinuation that can create major
challenges for family planning progress, Jokowi emphasized the
importance of investing the “village approach,” increasing access to
long acting contraceptives and reducing the cost of family planning by
providing free services and peer education programmes.
“I
believe that to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), we
have to take local action. In order to sustain economic growth,
investments in family planning are absolutely necessary… I want to
invite all global leaders to take real action to bring about healthy
mothers, healthy children and healthy and prosperous families – because
only by doing this, can we make planet earth a better place to live,”
Jokowi said.
Under-Secretary-General
of the United Nations and Executive Director of UNFPA, Prof. Babatunde
Osotimehin, "Family planning is about women's right and their capacity
to take decisions about their health and well-being contributing to the
objectives of FP2020.
“It
is a most significant investment to promote human capital development,
combat poverty and harness a demographic dividend thus contributing
to equitable and sustainable economic development within the context of
the Sustainable Development Goals.
Also
speaking, President of the Global Development Programme at the Bill
& Melinda Gates Foundation, Dr. Christopher Elias, said: “The family
planning data and evidence point to concrete steps we can take as a
community to get back on track to meet our FP2020 goal.
“Now
we must ask ourselves what more we can do to align our efforts to
ensure all women have the information and tools they need to time and
space their pregnancies.”
In a telecast, Vice President of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Melinda Gates reiterated the Foundation’s commitment to increasing funding for family planning by 2 percent
over the next three years.
In
a report by the Guttmacher Institute entitled: “Adding It Up: Investing
in Sexual and Reproductive Health” meeting all women’s needs for modern
contraception in the developing world would cost $9.4 billion annually,
an increase of $5.3 billion.
According
to the report, if all need for modern contraception were met, the
annual cost of pregnancy related care for women and their newborns would
be $28.0 billion, an increase of $13.8 billion.
“The
total includes $4.2 billion (a $3.0 billion increase) to provide HIV
testing and counseling for all pregnant women, testing for their
newborns and antiretroviral therapy for those who need it.
Further,
the report notes that fully meeting the need for modern contraception,
maternal and newborn health care, and antiretroviral care for pregnant
women living with HIV and their newborns, and treatment for four major
curable STIs would cost $39.2 billion annually, more than a doubling of
current spending in 2014.
But,
it also argued that fully satisfying women’s modern contraceptive needs
would make health care investments more affordable overall.
“For
every additional dollar invested in contraception, the cost of
pregnancy-related care (including HIV care for women and newborns) is
reduced by $1.47,” the report noted.
A
recent global progress report of the Family Planning 2020 (FP2020), a
global partnership focused on enabling an additional 120 million women
to access voluntary contraception by 2020, in the last three years, 24.4
million more women and girls who want to avoid or delay a pregnancy
have begun using modern contraceptives in the world’s poorest countries.
This
brings the total of women using a modern method of contraception in
FP2020’s 69 target countries to 290.6 million. However annual benchmarks
to measure family planning progress, revealed that modern contraceptive
use is behind 2015 projections by 10 million.
