Scale up sexuality education to address maternal hitches

Exaggeration is the lazy tool of advocates attached to a cause. With it, dies truth and the possibility of common ground. This week’s International Conference on Population and Development attracted its share of half-truths, manipulated facts and lies. What is its significance for the next decade?

Seven thousand delegates attended this week’s conference to reflect how far the world has changed since the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo, 25 years ago. Rallied by the United Nations Population Fund, 179 governments placed women’s empowerment at the centre of poverty reduction and population control strategies for the first time. Women must have the right to choose the number and timing of their children was part of the quantum leap achieved in 1994. Rather than states controlling women’s fertility, signatories committed to providing universal education, broadening the range of reproductive and sexual health services and reducing infant and maternal mortality and female genital mutilation (FGM).