Women waiting outside clinic. Photo: IRIN/Aubrey

Next to Ministers and  First Ladies, health experts, UN representatives, advocates and youth representatives, this year’s Women Deliver Conference that was held in Washington, D.C. from 7-9 June 2010 also hosted a Parliamentarians’ Forum for the first time which brought together more than 50 Parliamentarians.

“The biggest enemy of women’s health and rights is political indifference”, Jill Sheffield, President of Women Deliver remarked during the opening plenary session.

Ms. Safiye Çağar, Director IERD, UNFPA highlighted the important role Parliamentarians have in achieving maternal health and universal access to reproductive health until 2015. “You are responsible for listening to your constituents, to represent them adequately and to act as legislators”, Ms Çağar emphasised. Mr. Bert Koenders, former Minister for Development Co-operation of the Netherlands said that the role of Parliamentarians is underestimated. “Politicians need to break the silence that still surrounds MDG 5 and sexual and reproductive health and rights”, Koenders remarked.

The Parliamentarians’ Forum culminated in a Parliamentarians’ Statement. Amongst others, Parliamentarians called for additional US $12 billion a year to be invested in women and girls and  to actively work towards the establishment of a global funding mechanism for family planning, mothers and children with other international donors. The statement urges Ministers to establish realistic and verifiable annual action plans for reaching individual MDG targets with a special emphasis on MDG 5 to be presented at the UN High Level Meeting on the MDGs and commit to take a leading role in communicating the societal, economic, political and cultural benefits of investing in women and girls to key stakeholders. Parliamentarians were united in the necessity to pressure governments to deliver for women and girls, the need to reduce barriers for access to quality family planning services and the centrality this plays for the status of women in society as well as the need to improve co-operation between countries and continents.

Read full article from Women Deliver

Women Deliver

The Women Deliver 2010 conference ended on Wednesday with new energy and commitments for action for women’s health from members of parliament, young people and the rest of the more than 3,000 participants.

Women Deliver founder and president Jill Sheffield said the three-day gathering was, in Winston Churchill’s words, “not the end, not even the beginning of the end, but perhaps the end of the beginning” in the drive to halt the global toll of women’s deaths and disabilities from pregnancy-related causes.

At least one woman dies every 90 seconds from such causes and another 20 suffer infection or disability, while four million newborns die every year. These grim numbers actually represent improvements over the last 20 years, during which many international gatherings have pledged investments in women that failed to materialize.

A comprehensive report tracking progress in maternal and child health was launched on June 8 at the Women Deliver conference. According to the Countdown to 2015 decade report (2000-2010), a lack of skilled attendants at birth accounts for two million preventable maternal deaths, stillbirths and newborn deaths each year, in spite of remarkable progress in some poor countries. The report argues that achieving MDGs 4 and 5 (on maternal and newborn health) is possible by the deadline year 2015, but only a dramatic acceleration of political commitment and financial investment can make it happen.

Read full article by Joanne Omang at womendeliver.org

On March 8 - the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day-  numerous business reports on women and gender were released. Here are two particularly interesting:

The World Economic Forum’s Corporate Gender Gap Report 2010 is the first study to cover the world’s largest employers in 20 countries and benchmark them against the gender equality policies that most companies should have in place but are in fact widely missing. It shows that leading companies are failing to capitalize on the talents of women in the workforce.

Companies in the United States, Spain, Canada and Finland lead the world in employing the largest numbers of women from entry level to senior management. Yet women at many of the world’s top companies continued to lag behind their male peers in many areas, including pay and opportunities for professional advancement.

BSR’s released a report on its HERproject, a factory-based women’s health initiative. The Report is showing that the project has improved women’s health awareness, leadership skills, and relationships with their employers in China, Egypt, India, Mexico, Pakistan, and Vietnam.

“HERproject has given women the knowledge to improve their health behavior, and has empowered them to seek leadership roles in their jobs and their communities,” said HERproject Manager Racheal Yeager.

by: Johanna Löfgren, Product Manager AIDS Accountability Business Ranking