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The HIV/Aids pandemic is claiming hundreds of thousands of lives each year. Over 200 million women, mainly in the less developed countries, do not have access to contraceptives. Unsafe abortions cost the lives of 67,000 women every year while millions of others suffer from injury, illness or disability.

Those shameful statistics came under the spotlight at a recent forum on sexual and reproductive health and development in Berlin (2-4 September 2009).

The forum, attended by over 400 representatives of NGOs from 131 countries, was held to mark the 15th anniversary of the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) held in Cairo.

According to Laura Villa Torres of the Mexican Youth Network for Sexual and Reproductive Rights, the ICPD was a “groundbreaking moment in birth and sexual policy and family planning”.

“Until then,” she explained, “demographic policies both at the national and international level were characterised by undemocratic and sometimes even racist rules, such as forced sterilisations in determined ethnic groups.”

The ICPD underlined the importance of gender equality and of improving the status of women, and called for family planning to be made universally available by 2015, providing estimates of the national resources and international assistance that would be required.

However, those goals are still a long way from being achieved.

Gill Greer of the London-based International Planned Parenthood Federation said: “No doubt there has been progress, but it has been uneven and selective.

“The right to the highest attainable standard of health, particularly sexual and reproductive health, continues to elude millions of people, especially the poor and marginalised. Nobody should be dying for having sex. And yet, it happens every day.”

The fall in funding for sexual health highlights the failure of governments to address the problems.

Greer explained: “Between 1994 and 2008, funding for reproductive health as a proportion of health aid dropped from 30 to 12 per cent.”

According to Greer, the Vatican’s condemnation of sexual education and the conservative approach of former US president George W. Bush helped “political opposition to the ICPD programme to resurface, facilitating worldwide attacks against programmes for sexual and reproductive health”.

Financial rescue packages have further squeezed resources for human and development programmes, and environmental causes are taking precedence over sexual health issues.

However, Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, executive director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), believes money is being lost as a result.

The UNFPA sponsored the Berlin forum along with the German government, and Obaid told media representatives: “An additional dollar invested in voluntary family planning comes back at least four times in saved expenses.”

She added: “It would cost the world $23 billion a year to stop women from having unintended pregnancies and dying in childbirth, and to save millions of newborns.” The figure, she said, is equivalent to the sum that governments spend on military funding in just ten days.

Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, German minister for economic cooperation and development, made a called for governments of industrialised countries to set aside one percent of their economic emergency stimulus funds and put it towards development needs.

Wieczorek-Zeul said the theme for global policies must be: “It is not the market, stupid, it is the people who matter.”