World Population Day, which seeks to focus attention on the urgency and importance of population issues, was established by the then-Governing Council of the United Nations Development Programme. The date reflects the Day of Five Billion; the day designated by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) as the approximate day in 1987 on which the world population reached five billion.
For this year’s World Population Day, the United Nation calls for global attention to the unfinished business of the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development. One of the significant issues that came out of this conference was the recognition that reproductive health and rights are the mainspring of population and development programmes. Twenty-five years have passed since that landmark conference, where 179 governments including Ghana, recognized that reproductive health and gender equality are essential for achieving sustainable development.
The Alliance for Reproductive Health Rights is engaged in reaching this crucial goal and recognizes that reproductive health and gender equality are essential for achieving sustainable development in Ghana through several current projects including:
- The development of a national Gender Equality and Social Inclusion (GESI) framework to monitor the impact of policies related to Universal Health Care (UHC) on vulnerable groups and socially excluded persons with an overall aim of ensuring that gender equality and social inclusion is systematically integrated in universal health coverage in Ghana.
- The ARHR/UNFPA Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) Project which empowers adolescent girls through improved access to CSE and quality gender-responsive sexual reproductive health (SRH) services in six municipalities around that nation.
- The ARHR and City of Hope upcoming project to implement a Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) program for marginalized and vulnerable out-of-school, homeless adolescents of the urban slum community Agbogbloshie in Accra.
The attainment of these global goals through ARHR’s projects is imperative to ensure that the needs and aspirations of people in Ghana and around the world are met and that the basic human rights of people especially women are realized.
As the world population grows rapidly, it is important to address issues concerning reproductive health and rights as well as gender equality in order to avert the compounding issues and burden on the limited resources of the world.