SAVING WOMEN’S LIVES
Solving World Hunger While Helping Women and Girls

The Chicago Tribune featured a January 1 interview with Catherine Bertini, the first woman to head the World Food Program, which has an operating budget of $1.7 billion. When asked to talk about the program to get girls into schools, Bertini replied, “We did this scheme [in Iran] where for every month of attendance of a girl in school she could bring home a can of vegetable oil. It greatly increased the number of girls in school, to the point where the Iranians were having to build new facilities for schools and hire more teachers.” Bertini also revealed how she reconciles the U.N. ideal of respecting and understanding different cultures, including those far different from hers, with promoting humanitarian goals for women and girls, “The United Nations has a charter, and basic human rights are a part of that charter. The right of a child to go to school is critical to her well-being…It is not a Koranic value to say women can't work and girls can't go to school. In fact, the wife of Mohammed was a businesswoman. It's not a basic belief of the Muslim religion that girls should not be allowed to grow intellectually.” Read in: The Chicago Tribune

Women’s Rights in Turkey

As of January 1, Turkish women will enjoy equal rights when marrying because of a change of the country's Civil Code, reported United Press International on January 1. The law, passed by Parliament in November 2001, protects abandoned wives and gives women an equal voice in the family. In addition to political rights, the law institutes several legal changes, including more rights in divorce, inheritance and custody, mandatory coeducation, and an end to polygamy. "This is very important, because usually when women are married, their husbands do not want their wife to work out of the house," Janin Arin, a divorce lawyer, told the British Broadcasting Corp. "Of course, a woman can easily give up working out of the house, and at the end of 20 or 30 years, she becomes just nothing." In December 1999, the predominantly Muslim country found itself a candidate for full membership in the European Union. In wooing for full participation in the EU, Turkey has found that changes to its Civil Code are necessary.

Safe Motherhood in Nigeria

The Council for Health sponsored a two-day workshop for traditional birth attendants in Gwagwalada, Nigeria. Africa News disseminated a January 3 story that reported at the workshop’s closing ceremony, the chairman of the council, Alhaji Isa Ega Dobi urged them to put into use the experience acquired during the training. The workshop was organized to ensure safe motherhood among women living in the rural areas. Birth attendant materials were distributed to the participants included drugs, cotton wool and disinfectants. Read in: Africa News

AIDS IN ASIA

“AIDS in China is spreading at a breakneck pace -- reported cases are up 67 percent this year over last -- in large part because its citizens are so poorly informed about the disease,” according to a December 30 front page story by The New York Times. Wang Zhiguo, a former blood seller from Henan Province, said in an interview that he had not even heard of AIDS until this spring, long after he began to suffer from AIDS-related headaches and fevers. Even today, he is unsure whether HIV can be transmitted through sex. And from mother to infant? "I'm not clear about that either," Mr. Wang said. In Vietnam, the number of Vietnamese with AIDS rose by 24.1 percent in 2001, and those who died from the disease increased by 22 percent, according to the Vietnam News Agency via a January 3 Associated Press story. Vietnam now has 210 children under the age of 5 who contracted the disease from HIV-infected mothers, said an official from the Ministry of Health's Anti-AIDS Bureau. Read in: The New York Times

CONDOM BANS CHALLENGED

Catholics for a Free Choice’s “Condoms for Life” campaign continued to generate press. Kenya’s East African Standard reported December 27 that “Nairobi is set to see massive public advertisements condemning the Catholic Church's ban on the use of condoms in the fight against HIV/AIDS.” Frances Kissling, President of CFFC, said the campaign is expected to be met with hostility from the Catholic faithful, but her group is determined to make an impact in Kenya as it has in other countries. The campaign was launched to coincide with World Aids Day 2001 and involves mobilizing efforts in the United States, Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America to change the Vatican's condom policy. The Washington Post reported January 3 that the Archdiocese of Washington condemned the campaign as "false and misleading." Metro spokesman Ray Feldmann said the transit authority's legal office "essentially determined that people may disagree with the content and portrayal of bishops" but that there was "nothing obscene, pornographic, lewd or offensive" in the ads to prevent them from running. Read in: East African Standard; The Washington Post (NPR covered the Post’s story). Frances Kissling also made a January 3 appearance on CNN’s Crossfire. Read Kissling’s December 29 letter in The Washington Times.

On December 29, the Xinhua General News Service reported that the Beijing-based Science and Technology Daily called on China’s State Administration for Industry and Commerce division to lift its ban on condom advertisements. The ban, started in 1989, strictly prohibited advertising any products meant to cure sexual dysfunction or help improve people's sex life. "Advertising is not the goal but a method," said Wang Xuehai, general manager of Jissbon Sanitary Product Co., Ltd. " Advertisement promotes not only sales of products but also advancement of society."

DEVELOPMENT AID FOR AFGHANISTAN

United Nations Development Program Administrator Mark Malloch Brown said an initial assessment drawn up by UNDP, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, with input from interim government officials and nongovernmental aid organizations, put the five-year cost of reconstructing Afghanistan at a "relatively solid" $9 billion. The estimate does not include military security costs. According to a December 26 story by The Washington Post, the United States intends to concentrate its initial bilateral efforts on agricultural projects and those that improve the situation of women, said a senior administration official. "I'd make two points," Secretary of State Colin Powell said in an interview last week. "One, there is a huge interest in the international community to help. So this isn't a 'U.S.-has-to-do-it, go-it-alone' [effort]…The second point I'd make is that Afghanistan is not like the rebuilding of Japan or Europe…a little money will go a long way." Powell has long advocated increased U.S. spending on development worldwide, a view not widely shared in the administration or Congress. "If I were given a free rein, I would ask for a lot more than I'm given now," Powell said. "I think it is not right that a nation of our wealth should not spend more in helping the rest of the world…We could do a lot more, and we should be doing a lot more.” Read in: The Washington Post

Germany has earmarked some $118 million for emergency aid projects in Afghanistan to help the country ravaged by more than two decades of conflict and further devastated by the US-led war on terror, according to a January 1 story by Agence France Presse. "Our main focus is help with reconstruction, above all through education," said Ursula Mueller, the embassy advisor coordinating aid for Afghanistan. "We are mainly trying to get civilian life off the ground. It's very basic work we're doing here." Mueller will also focus on the needs of Afghan women who suffered five years of abuse and hardship under the Taliban regime that denied them education and jobs. "I want to enable women here to be heard," said Mueller, who has already set up a meeting with the new women's minister of the interim administration, Sima Samar.

WELFARE OF CHILDREN

On January 3, The Deseret News (Salt Lake City, UT) featured a story on the developments surrounding the UN General Assembly Special Session on Children – tentatively scheduled in May. One area religious groups has been concerned about is the language of the U.N. documents. A. Scott Loveless, Associate Director of the World Family Policy Center at Brigham Young University, said he'd like to see the word “abstinence” included in plans for international reproductive health care. In addition, Susan Roylance of United Families International helped publish a "Pro-Family Negotiating Guide," that includes 22 U.N. documents, noting paragraphs that "promote our Five Respects (family, human life, parents, religious values and sovereignty)." The article also noted UN success stories of a major effort in Africa to increase the use of iodized salt and vitamin A, resulting in fewer children suffering from blindness or brain damage. As for literacy, Carol Bellamy, Executive Director of UNICEF, reported that the enrollment of children in school has outpaced the population growth. Still 100 million children, mostly girls, are not in school. Read in: The Deseret News: “The Status of Children” and “129 Million Children Born in World Each Year.”

In UNICEF’s latest analysis of Tanzania, it said, "The decade of the 1990s can truly be called a lost decade for children in Tanzania." The PanAfrican News Agency reported December 26 that according to the assessment, infant and child mortality rates stagnated in the 1990s but may have risen in the last few years, exacerbated by an accelerating rate of HIV/AIDS infections. The government has constantly asserted that despite the serious challenges for survival and development facing it like any other developing country, it is trying hard to address the situation of its children. But UNICEF maintains that "the major challenge still remains: how to link the macroeconomic and structural reforms in a dynamic manner to the fundamental goal of reducing poverty, enhancing the quality of human life – of realizing the human rights of children."

INTERNATIONAL FAMILY PLANNING

Iranian President Mohammad Khatami said that Iran can become an important center to assist the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA) in promoting cooperation with developing countries, according to a December 23 story by the Xinhua General News Service. During a meeting in Iran with visiting UNFPA Executive Director Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, Khatami said Iran is interested in expanding cooperation with the U.N. body, IRNA news agency reported. Khatami said the world's attention should focus on women and population issues in the Islamic world and developing countries. He also stressed the need to improve living conditions of the war-weary Afghan people.

OPINIONS AND EDITORIALS

On December 28, The Washington Post’s Judy Mann wrote a final column announcing her retirement, titled, “A Farewell Wish: That Women Will Be Heard.” She stressed that women “should occupy 50 percent of the top editorships in newspapers. We should be allowed to bring what interests us -- as women and mothers and wives -- to the table: “Challenging the miserly foreign-aid budget and raising hell because we are not doing our share to educate women and girls in emerging countries; asking difficult questions like why families in those countries continue to have eight and 10 children, who survive thanks to our maternal and child health programs and who then become an increasing burden on already scarce resources; and using valuable column space to tell readers about programs that are working and to gain public and political support for them.” Read in: The Washington Post

[NOTE: To send letters of thanks to Judy Mann for her regular coverage of global population and reproductive health, email her at: JudyMannS@aol.com.]

On the list of factors keeping poor countries poor, a prominent place must go to disease, stressed a January 3 editorial in The New York Times. The editorial profiled a new study commissioned by the World Health Organization that puts a dollar figure on the rewards of improving health among the globe's poor. The Commission on Macroeconomics and Health asks rich countries to spend an extra one-tenth of 1 percent of their economies on the health of the poor. The editorial concluded, “Washington does not need self-interest to increase its health aid. The chance to save lives and reduce poverty should be incentive enough.” Read in: The New York Times

On January 1, The New York Times ran an op ed by George McGovern, former U.S. Senator (South Dakota), and American Ambassador to the UN Food and Agriculture agency. In it, he proposed a U.S. allocation of $500 million a year to the U.N. World Food Program to run a universal school lunch program and a nutritional supplement program for pregnant women and preschool children. “The school lunch program is especially important because it could help draw more children into school. Illiteracy consigns millions of young women to early childbearing and lives of poverty (illiterate women have a birth rate more than double that of women who have gone to school).” He concluded, “if we take care of hungry kids and mothers while improving the conditions of life in the villages where most of the world's people live, we'll produce less hate and more love.” Read in: The New York Times

The Chicago Tribune’s December 31 editorial criticized South African President Thabo Mbeki for continually denying South African AIDS victims government attention, access to drugs, and educational programs. It also criticized the government’s latest challenge to a Pretoria High Court order that it widen access to the AIDS drug nevirapine, which has been proven to reduce mother-to-child transmission of HIV during pregnancy by up to 50 percent. “Mbeki lives on a continent inhabited by over two-thirds of the world's people infected with HIV/AIDS--more than 28 million. What more evidence does he need that the potential benefits of nevirapine, or any other anti-AIDS medications, greatly outweigh the risks he still imagines exist with such drugs?” Read in: The Chicago Tribune

The above analysis was written by Elena Cabatu and Kathy Bonk at the Communications Consortium Media Center, 1200 New York Avenue, NW, Suite 300, Washington, DC 20005, 202/326-8700. Redistribution is encouraged with credit to CCMC.

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