More goals for women’s health as ICPD marks 25 years
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Looking ahead: Madusha Dissanayake and Bradman Weerakoon
In 1994, Sri Lanka was one of 179 countries in Cairo for the landmark International Conference on Population & Development (ICPD) that laid out a far-sighted plan for advancing human well-being that places the human rights of individuals, rather than numerical population targets, at the centre of global development. Bradman Weerakoon was the Head of the first delegation from Sri Lanka. In 2014, Madusha Dissanayake would represent Sri Lanka, when ICPD marked its 20thanniversary.
Today, 25 years on, with the Nairobi Summit on ICPD25 this week, they reflect on the road that led to where Sri Lanka is today, and the challenges ahead.
In the years leading up to the first International Conference on Population & Development (ICPD) conference in Cairo, Bradman Weerakoon had become one of Sri Lanka’s most respected civil servants. Famous as a man who served under nine Prime Ministers of Sri Lanka, he had a front row seat, when in October 1953, Prime Minister John Kotelawala led Sri Lanka into the UN.
“John Kotelawala was very open and most generous in his views. He believed in women’s equality and there were no distinctions in his mind. He believed in human rights for all. Ignorance was a crime for him,” Mr. Weerakoon recalls. In those years, Sri Lanka’s fledgling democracy had begun to invest increasingly in education and health.
Mr. Weerakoon believed that family planning and controlled population growth were the keys to ensuring a prosperous future for Sri Lanka. In the 1970s, as Government Agent in Galle, Ampara and Kalutara, Mr. Weerakoon would see to the establishing of the first family planning clinics in the area.
Sri Lanka’s approach to family planning has been about ensuring people have access to the relevant information and contraceptives they needed to make informed decisions. “None of our governments ever imposed birth control on families, we never had a one-child policy; people took to it of their own volition. They always had and still have a choice,” says Mr. Weerakoon.
In 1984, Mr. Weerakoon would take up a place at the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) which before the world’s first International Conference on Human Rights successfully argued that Family Planning too was a human right. It was a foundation which the UNFPA would build on. As IPPF’s Secretary General, Mr. Weerakoon would valiantly resist moves to curtail family planning resources and facilities, even when their biggest funders threatened to pull out. For their pioneering work, they received the United Nations Population Award in 1985.
Mr. Weerakoon’s conviction and commitment came from a deep respect for a woman’s right to control her own body. “It was simply a right that I thought everybody should recognize.”
When his stint with the IPPF ended in 1989, Mr. Weerakoon would return to Sri Lanka, and government service. A few years later, he led the delegation to the ICPD, a conference marked by a number of highly publicized controversies around reproductive rights and reproductive health, notably around adolescent sexual and reproductive health. Against all odds, a consensus was reached on many vital issues.
The conference shifted how population policies and programmes would be formulated and implemented in the future, marking a change from top-down approaches and centrally formulated demographic goals, to those that responded to the individual needs and rights of couples and women.
The conference also drove a deeper understanding of how population was linked to sustainable development. It looked at population dynamics such as migration, population growth, ageing, and urbanization, and how countries would thrive only if these issues were factored into development plans, policies and programmes. Importantly, Mr. Weerakoon saw support crystallize for their argument that gender equality and the empowerment of women must be pursued not just in principle but also simply because it would improve quality of life for everyone, including men and boys.
20 years later, when Madusha (Madu) Dissanayake, sat in the audience of ICPD+20 she saw these very accomplishments encapsulated in the testimonies of young people who had been born in the intervening years. Here was a generation focused on ensuring the human rights and empowerment of women, and of society as a whole. A generation that understood that the first and biggest step would be to give women the information and agency they needed to decide what would happen to their own bodies.
However, while the ICPD had delivered on many promises, there was still a long way to go.
“Our goal now is zero maternal mortality, zero unmet need for family planning, and zero incidence of gender-based violence,” says Ms. Dissanayake. Drawing from years of experience working in sexual and reproductive health at the Family Planning Association and now at UNFPA where she is Assistant Representative in Sri Lanka, she sees these three goals as inextricably intertwined.
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) focus on universal health access which includes sexual and reproductive health-care services, including for family planning, information and education, and the integration of reproductive health into national strategies and programmes. In recent years, sexual and reproductive health has been consistently included in key indicators in global health policymaking and providing access to these services is now seen increasingly as a human right.
2019 is a moment where Sri Lanka must reaffirm its commitment to certain vital principles.
“In hindsight, what we accomplished was the result of progressive changes, rather than any single moment,” Mr. Weerakoon says. Ms. Dissanayake agrees, pointing to the provision of free education and healthcare as one of Sri Lanka’s great strengths.
For Mr. Weerakoon, it is essential that Sri Lanka continues to build on its achievements. Sri Lanka’s thorniest challenges now lie in empowering youth and addressing pernicious gender-based violence, he feels.
Ms. Dissanayake thinks it is time to address the policy, legislative and constitutional gaps that allow discrimination based on an individual’s sexual orientation and gender identity. “Such a change would enable Sri Lanka to move forward in its development process, with the aim of offering access to education, health and decent work as a basic human right,” she says.
This year marks the 25th anniversary of the ICPD and Sri Lanka will be there at this key global platform to be held in Nairobi from November 12-14. The Nairobi Summit will bring together heads of state, ministers, parliamentarians, thought-leaders, experts, faith-based organizations, and the business community from around the world. Joining Ritsu Nacken, the Representative of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) in Sri Lanka, is a delegation of Government officials, members of academia, civil society and youth representatives.
Ms. Nacken tells the Sunday Times that 25 years on from that first conference, Sri Lanka can be proud of the significant strides it has made in women’s health. “We hope that through the landmark Nairobi Summit on ICPD25 and its outcomes, we can further ensure all women and young people have access to sexual and reproductive health services and information, so that they can lead healthy and dignified lives and fulfil their potential,” she says, adding, “this is imperative to achieve UNFPA’s triple zeros and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, leaving no one behind. We must act now. If not now, then when?”
For more about the Nairobi Summit on ICPD25: www.nairobisummiticpd.org