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Banking on Reproductive Health |
 The World Bank's Support for Population, the Cairo Agenda
and the Millennium Development Goals
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 Women of childbearing age constitute a billion of the world's poorest people, and adolescents just entering adulthood are a billion on their own. For both these groups, reproductive health issues predominate among the burdens of current and future ill health and productivity loss. Clearly, without the full and healthy participation of nearly one-third of humankind in economic life, broad-based poverty reduction will remain a distant aspiration.
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) do not include a goal specific to reproductive health. Yet the contribution of these issues to health and productivity is well documented. Impacts at the macro level are also clear: without adequate access to these services, fertility rates among the poor in the great majority of countries engaged in the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative have not begun to decline. Extremely rapid population growth challenges attainment of even modest improvements in the percentages enrolled in school, raises the ratio of patients to health providers, and makes new job creation an endless treadmill. And of course, in a world of AIDS, a comprehensive approach to sexual and reproductive health is necessary to turn the tide on this pandemic.
This report focuses attention on the World Bank, which has made a public and corporate commitment to the MDGs. As a development bank committed to the expansion of knowledge and application of empiricism to health and development strategies, the Bank's leadership is critical. As outlined in the ICPD Programme of Action a full decade ago, universal access to reproductive health is essential, but the reality of progress has seriously lagged behind the commitments made.
This report examines the Bank's attention to the Cairo agenda through the lens of its commitment to the MDGs. Key challenges and constraints remain, not the least of which is a realistic assessment of current investments and the appropriate place of reproductive health in the broader development agenda. As this report makes clear, it is unlikely that these goals can be met absent significantly increased support and expansion of proven interventions, measurement of progress, commitment of resources and technical expertise, and collaboration between donors and recipient countries.
Clearly, the Bank can play a more central role of leadership in promoting universal access to reproductive health as a necessary, efficient and just means of achieving the MDGs. Through this emphasis, the Bank can further its mission of a world free of poverty. It is our hope that this report can contribute to this ongoing dialogue.
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 Banking on Reproductive Health - The World Bank's Support for Population, the Cairo Agenda and the Millennium Development Goals (PDF - 483K)
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Email: research@globalhealth.org
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