When I think of the United Nations, I think of Ted Turner, blue hats sitting by during the Rwandan genocide, and the inability to say “boo” to rogue nations because they all seem to have friends on the U.N. Security Council. Today I learned about another side of the UN: the United Nations Population Fund (which is also known by the acronym UNFPA, left over from a previous unweildy name).
“UNFPA supports countries in using populatioln data for policies and programmes to reduce poverty and to ensure that every pregnancy is wanted, every birth is safe, every young person is free of HIV/AIDS, and every girl and woman is treated with dignity and respect.”
The UNFPA does not carry out programs, rather it uses research and evaluation to identify the problems and then partners with the best NGOs working in the communities to address the issues. It learns best practices from those NGOs and shares them across the country. It takes the lessons of those programs and advocates for effective government policy. It sets goals and targets for improvements in women’s health and develops and reports on metrics to measure progress.
For example, maternal mortality in Uganda is still a major issue, as only 42% of women give birth with the assistance of “skilled personnel,” such as a midwife. UNFPA is supporting the training of midwives. But they have also discovered that midwives don’t necessarily want to live and work in the really rural areas of Uganda, which are most in need of skilled assistance. They would rather live near urban areas. So they are developing a program to fund midwife education in exchange for three years of service in a rural area, after which the midwife would be free to relocate. The five-year goal is to increase the percentage of births attended by skilled personnel from 42% to 70%.
UNFPA was also successful in bringing together a coalition of the four major religions in Uganda–Muslim, Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox–to form a faith-based commission that came together around HIV/AIDS prevention and sex ed in particular. The first chair of the commission was a Catholic bishop, who was naturally asked if this meant the Catholic Church had dropped its opposition to abortion, answered by citing what is known as the ABCs:
A: It is best if you abstain.
B: But if you can’t abstain, don’t be stupid–be faithful to one uninfected partner.
C: If you can’t abstain and must be stupid, don’t be foolish–use a condom.
In practice, anecdotes suggest that when a Catholic school goes to teach sex ed to its students, any nuns leave the room. They don’t stop others from teaching about safe sex, they just decline to be involved.
Since the Bush administration had refused to fund UNFPA at all over the last eight years because of objections the UNFPA’s lack of objection to abortion, America currently provides no funding for this, the smalled UN agency. with the new Obama administration, there is a chance that Congress will again pass an allocation (as they have done for the last eight years and then been vetoed) and it will be funded. For anyone interested in maternal health and mortality, gender equity, gender-based violence or female genital mutilation, there is a real opportunity right now to advocate for funding for UNFPA.
Tags: reproductive health, uganda, UNFPA, United Nations
