Filed under Women

The Millennium Development Goals recently received a major boost from the international community. On 22nd September, speeches of support for the MDGs flowed from all corners of the United Nations, and the international community pledged $40bn to help achieve the goals by 2015. The Guardian reports,

Not only donor countries but also developing nations promised to spend more on the poorest people in their societies. Tanzania promised to increase health spending from 12% to 15% of the national budget by 2015 and increase the numbers of health workers it trains and employs. Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame, who has played a prominent role in the summit and was warmly praised a few days ago by Ban as a “stellar leader”, pledged to spend 15% of the budget on health by 2012. His country has already brought maternal mortality down from 1,071 to 383 per 100,000 births between 2000 and 2008.

Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, announced a new alliance on maternal health between USAID, the UK, Australia and the Gates Foundation, which will focus on the dearth of family planning in developing countries. Norway, Australia and France were among those promising substantial new money. Pledges also came from aid organisations, philanthropic foundations and businesses.

Nick Clegg was keen to show leadership. He said, “My message to you today, from the UK government, is this: we will keep our promises and we expect the rest of the international community to do the same.” The Guardian also reports that Clegg

committed the UK to double the number of women’s and children’s lives saved by reorienting Britain’s aid programme to put their needs at its core – in addition to new funding for malaria

See here for the full Guardian article.

UNAIDS’ new program, “Agenda for Action”, seeks to fight the spread of AIDS by advancing women’s rights and empowerment. Read about it here.

UNDP highlight that, “AIDS is the leading cause of death  among women of reproductive age (15-49) worldwide.” As UNDP Administrator Helen Clarke notes,

“We have to see the promotion of women’s rights as intricately, intimately and intrinsically linked with combating the HIV/AIDS epidemic… If we can’t deal with this fundamental issue of the status of women, how do we effectively combat the spread of this epidemic?”

This new initiative will:

• support leadership development for HIV positive women and girls in 30 countries
• support positive women’s networks being fully involved and reporting on the Millennium Development Goals
• encourage countries to put HIV reporting into their reporting under the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW)
• initiate “know your rights” campaigns focusing on the rights of women and girls in a number of countries

Giving What We Can’s research into AIDS interventions found that,

“Education appears to be the most effective way to reduce the number of people will die from HIV/AIDS”

“It would cost $1000 to extend one HIV-sufferer’s life for two years through antiretroviral therapy… But the same $1000 could extend people’s lives by a total of about 950 years if spent on preventing the spread of the disease through mass media HIV/AIDS education”

See here for Giving What We Can’s HIV/AIDS research, which includes a helpful chart sowing the relative cost-effectiveness of different interventions.