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MONTERREY,
Mexico -- It's been just seven and a half years
since the International Conference on Population
and Development (ICPD) was held in Cairo, and yet
there is mounting evidence that it has already
had a dramatic effect in reducing population growth
in many parts of the world. The 1994 Cairo conference
drew an extraordinary amount of media attention,
largely because of the hotly contested issue of
abortion. But in fact the conference was not really
about abortion at all. Its main contribution to
the ongoing debate over population policies was
that it condemned the use of numerical targets
for population stabilization and instead promoted
the idea that governments pay more attention to
the rights and status of women and girls. And they
have. Wherever you look, you can see more women
participating in governments, not only national
but also local. You can see more girls attending
school. Not so visible, but no less real, is the
fact that more and more young women are aspiring
to careers in fields that were not open to their
mothers or grandmothers. Unlike prior generations
of women, they have opportunities to play a variety
of roles, not only those of wife and mother. As
a result of that-and some other factors as well-more
and more women are taking control of their fertility
and deciding to have fewer children. Birth rates
and fertility rates (the average number of children
born to each woman) are in decline almost everywhere,
and especially in the poorest countries, where
they had been the highest. The change is so dramatic
that demographic experts are busily revising their
population projections for the rest of this century.
Those
other factors, including increased urbanization and
wider availability of contraceptives, are surely
part of the reason for this change. But clearly the
rising status of women and girls, stressed so effectively
by the Cairo conference, must be given credit for
most of it. It surely should come as no surprise
that some international conferences are more effective,
more productive than others. Nor is there any mystery
about why that is: They are able to muster broad
international support for an idea that governments
around the world can implement. They endorse specific
actions that governments can take. And sometimes
they even help find ways to assist governments of
poor countries pay the costs of those actions.
Later this spring the international community
will be reviewing another hugely successful
international conference, the World Children's
Summit, held in New York in 1990 under the
sponsorship of Unicef. Unlike most international
meetings, which concern themselves chiefly
with negotiating a final document, the Children's
Summit served as a kind of matchmaker for maternal
and child health programs. It identified specific
health problems in a number of poor countries,
problems responsive to treatment or preventive
interventions using technology currently available
and affordable. It secured the cooperation
of the governments of those countries to oversee
and promote the programs-such as immunization,
prenatal examinations or distribution of oral
rehydration salts-and arranged for the governments
of donor countries to help pay for them. All
of the programs were given specific targets-such
as reducing the incidence of a disease in that
country by a certain percentage-and all were
given a 10-year time frame to achieve that
result.
We'll soon learn how many of the programs
met their targets, but that is really beside
the point. By any definition, the Children's
Summit has to be reckoned one of the most successful
global conferences ever held-a model other
summits might do very well to emulate.
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