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“Progress for Women is Progress for All”

  • post Type / Growth and Development
  • Date / 5 February 2006

World Summit Commits to Universal Access to Reproductive Health by 2015

The largest ever gathering of world leaders resolved in September to achieve universal access to reproductive health by 2015, promote gender equality and end discrimination against women, at a recent three-day World Summit.

They adopted the Summit Outcome recommended by the General Assembly and will integrate the goal of access to reproductive health into national strategies to attain the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to end poverty, reduce maternal death, promote gender equality and combat HIV/AIDS.

Recognizing that HIV/AIDS, malaria and other infectious diseases hampered development and threatened the world, the leaders pledged to increase investments to improve health systems in poor countries. The aim was to provide sufficient supplies, health workers and facilities.

The leaders committed to measures to increase the capacities of adults and adolescents to protect themselves from HIV infection, according to the Summit Outcome. They would also provide stronger leadership; scale up a comprehensive response to achieve multi-sectoral coverage for prevention, care, treatment and support for those threatened by HIV/AIDS; and mobilize more resources to fully implement the commitments in the 2001 Declaration of Commitment on HIV/AIDS. Substantial funding, they pledged, would be given to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS and to the anti-HIV/AIDS work of United Nations bodies, according to the agreement.

Turning to women’s rights, the world’s leaders agreed to promote gender equality and eliminate pervasive gender discrimination with several measures. They would include:

  • Eliminating gender inequalities in schools;
  • Guaranteeing the free and equal right of women to own and inherit property;
  • Ensuring equal access to reproductive health;
  • Promoting women’s equal access to work;
  • Eliminating all forms of discrimination and violence against women and girls; and
  • Promoting increased women’s representation in government decision-making bodies.

They declared: “We remain convinced that progress for women is progress for all.”

Based on UNFPA Press Release

Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all. – Hypatia (370-415, Egypt)

Probably the prevailing opinion, that woman was created for man, may have taken its rise from Moses’s poetical story; yet, as very few, it is presumed, who have bestowed any serious thought on the subject, ever supposed that Eve was, literally speaking one of Adam’s ribs, the deduction must be allowed to fall to the ground; or, only so far admitted as it proves that, from the remotest antiquity, found it convenient to exert his strength to subjugate his companion, and his invention to shew that she ought to have her neck bent under the yoke, because the whole creation was only created for his convenience or pleasure. – Mary Wollstonecraft, 1790

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