Inter Press Service - September 13, 2004
Sanjay Suri

Obaid says there is reason for optimism despite the ideological and actual opposition from the present U.S. administration and the Vatican to provision of essential reproductive services in the developing world.

"Look at our budget, for example. When the U.S. defunded us in 2002 we had a gap," she told IPS in an interview. "In 2003 we covered the gap. The U.S. Congress had voted for 34 million dollars, which is 12 percent of our budget. But a number of donors increased their contribution. In 2004 we project that UNFPA will have the highest budget since it was established -- without U.S. money. If this is an indication of future trends, then we are on the correct track."

Obaid spoke of a time for stock-taking around a conference on reproductive health called in London last week to mark the midway point between the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) held in Cairo in 1994 and the target date for universal reproductive rights.

"I am very hopeful that over the next ten years the funding will come," Obaid said. "What has happened last year clearly, and hopefully it will happen again this year, is that our donor base grew from 92 when I came in 2001 to 147 country donors. And that means that the increase in donor base came from developing countries. Which is a silent response to the U.S. position. But it is also an assertion of their commitment to the ICPD agenda."

Going by the commitments made in Cairo in 1994, the worldwide budget for reproductive rights should be 18.5 billion dollars by next year. It stands currently at 15 billion dollars, of which 12 billion dollars comes from developing countries.

The rest is from the donors, who are paying at the moment about 40 percent of what they are committed to paying.

"But to be fair to the donors, there is a new realisation," Obaid said. "It came with the links with the millennium development goals. Now that the UN secretary-general has said it, the donors are realising also that if you do not have universal access to reproductive health services, you are not going to fulfil a number of the MDGs (millennium development goals)."

This realisation, she said, "is making them look again at greater investment in this whole area, at the links between sexual reproductive health, HIV/AIDS and the MDGs. And that I believe will be an impetus to move forward in terms of funding."

But Obaid's accent is clearly on self-sufficiency. "Over the next ten years, the main thing is to strengthen national responses, so that it will be nationally built into the budgets of the countries," she says. "The other is to scale up responses so that you have reproductive health, HIV centres reaching people in sub-districts and so on."

National resources will be the most challenging area for the next ten years, she said. "This is the area where we have to invest to be able to get the countries to think in the long run to be self-sufficient in terms of their own human resources, so that the institutions are capable of implementing, and they have allocated from their own resources a priority to this area."

Obaid is confident also that religious issues will not prove a major obstacle. "Even in Catholic countries like Guatemala, Nicaragua and Costa Rica, our programmes are moving," she said.

"The issue is how you promote it, and how you deal with it," the UNFPA chief said. For example, in Guatemala there was a social development law to go through parliament with a component on reproductive health.

"It took us about a year-and-a-half to mobilise different civil society groups, including the Catholic Church, to come together to be the main advocates for the law. The law was passed, with a component for reproductive health. And that's a Vatican influenced country," Obaid said."

The programmes are not encountering obstacles in the Islamic world, she said. "We do not have a problem as UNFPA in any Islamic country," she said. "None of them have asked us to leave, and they have the right to do that, because we are there on their invitation. That means our programmes in these countries are legitimate, they are approved, and they are working. We do not get the kind of reaction we get from the U.S. and the Vatican."

The UNFPA is running good programmes in all the Muslim countries," Obaid said. "Bangladesh for example has a very good programme. We have not had any outcry in Pakistan even with the environment there. The problems are more of absorptive capacity, of the ability to implement, but they are not ideologically motivated."

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