By Khawar Mumtaz
March 1999
Khawar Mumtaz outlines how the ICPD helped to shift the nature of the population and development debate in Pakistan by bringing women's fundamental needs and the links between productive and reproductive rights into sharp relief.
Women in Pakistan: the context
Pakistan is the second largest Muslim state and the seventh most populated country of the world and has had an unsustainably high rate of population growth (3.1 percent in 1981). Fortunately the preliminary results of the latest population census (1998) held after a gap of 17 years, show a turn around to a growth rate of 2.6 percent. The majority of the country's 130.58 million people continue to live in rural areas (67.5 percent down from 72 percent in 1981). While consolidated census results disaggregated by sex have not yet been released, the data available indicate that the male-female ratio remains negative (in 1981 women formed 47 percent of the total population). It is estimated that only about 28 percent of Pakistan's women are literate (Government of Pakistan, 1997-98, p.119) and rural area female literacy rates range from 3 percent to 9 percent.
When we talk about women in Pakistan we are referring to a section of the population that is both deprived and underprivileged. Women take part in all types of production processes, especially agricultural processes (in fact production would not be possible without their inputs), however, these are not always recognized and acknowledged. In terms of health conditions women's life spans are shorter than those of men, the fertility rate is about six children per woman, the maternal mortality is estimated to be between 300 and 600 per 100,000 births, and 30 percent of pregnant and lactating women are underweight. (Government of Pakistan, 1997-1998, p.129).
The impact of the ICPD on Pakistan
It is from the perspective of this situation that we have to see what Cairo meant to Pakistan. Cairo had an important impact on both the planners and women's and human rights activists in Pakistan. It was a breakthrough, a major breakthrough for a country where population welfare has been synonymous with control. Historically, for policy makers population welfare/planning has been about controlling women's fertility without attention to women's needs. Cairo expanded the frontier of the population debate placing women's rights in the centre and giving it a new dimension: of women's rights, the right to exercise choice to determine the number of children, the right to control their bodies and the right to development. However, the Cairo consensus in Pakistan does not mean that rights have followed automatically, it represents the recognition of some fundamental principles.
Women's rights to the fore
What Cairo did in terms of actual change was that leading women's rights groups began to look at reproductive health as a women's rights issue. They took on board an agenda which had previously been marginal to their concerns and confined to health practitioners and family planning service-providers and included it within the broader framework of women's human rights. That was an extremely important shift from the point of view of the women's movement in Pakistan. It may be added that Pakistan has an extremely dynamic women's movement which emerged in the last 15 years. This movement for women's rights has simultaneously been a movement for democracy. It has strongly advocated policy planning from a women-centred approach, to view women as people and not as objects or instruments of either economic production or human reproduction.
It was therefore extremely important for the women's movement to recognize reproductive rights in the overall struggle for equal rights. Thus the shift was significant --towards a broader view of women's rights and needs; from just providing family planning services, and those also very inadequately, to looking at women's other needs and addressing them; to have a vision of women in control, making decisions about themselves and their families and executing them. Remembering that this occurred in the context of a society where women are looked upon as second class citizens and where the recognition of their rights is extremely crucial for them, both emotionally and psychologically this was a major step forward. Even if implementation tends to come some years after accepting a principle, once a principle has been accepted it gives you the force to move forward.
Cairo drew many of the family planning practitioners, who hitherto were focused on narrowly defined demographic targets, onto the women's rights platform. Thus it was really very timely: it broadened the platform of women's struggle, brought different people concerned with the diverse aspects of women's lives on the same platform, and created the space towards a consensus on the full spectrum of women's human rights.
The role of civil society
Cairo Conference was also the point when concerned civil society groups made a strong impact on government in terms of refocusing policy, in terms of looking upfront at the issue of population, not only as a question of women's fertility, but as women's right to good health and health facilities, access to services, to the exercise of choice in family planning methods and the desired number of children --an extremely important factor in a society where having a large number of children, especially male, is seen as enhancing women's status. Cairo marked the turning around of one perspective and the beginning of another, not yet internalized, but in full view in clearer form.
The impact of globalization
When we move from the local to the global arena we find that the economic globalization phenomena (usually beyond one country's control) have been disadvantageous for the region of South Asia as a whole and has had a particularly negative impact on women. In Pakistan the globalization of the economy has meant that the poverty levels have spiralled with basic survival and livelihood needs of the people not being met, increasing in turn the pressure on women --the managers of household nutrition and physical needs. The food that women were able to produce for the family is now being sent to the market to create cash incomes; as poverty increases theirs as well as their families' survival is at stake. In other words globalization of economies has had an adverse impact on people's livelihoods, on their subsistence, their being able to live and feed themselves.
Perhaps the poor experienced these impacts much before the well-off of the world. This was visible at the Fourth World Conference on Women held in 1995 in Beijing. Whereas Cairo created new frontiers for women, Beijing revealed a gap in the priorities of the women of the North and those of the South. At the global level women from the North were pushing for greater bodily rights, more recognition of their sexuality, the right to follow their preferences. The women from the South were ready to support that movement, in fact supported it fully, but found inadequate reciprocal sentiment for their issues of sheer survival in the face of rising globalization, for the right to quality of life and sustainable livelihoods.
They found that the issue of globalization was not receiving matching support and attention that the women of the South were willing to give to women of the North. As we prepare for Cairo +5 we have to narrow that gap, if our objective is to move forward together for a just and better world where everybody has the equal right to development and opportunities. That should be our direction for now and for the future, especially when we meet to review and assess the achievements and short-comings of the Cairo Programme five years down.
Some key questions to consider for Cairo +5
The key questions that we need to take to Cairo +5 are: how do we consolidate the global women's movement, to look sensitively at the underprivileged women around the world who comprise a very large chunk of humankind, to ensure their empowerment for achieving equal rights, of living with dignity and fulfilling their basic needs and desires? We very strongly need to highlight the linkages between socio-economic rights and personal rights. There has to be more work and more support for work which establishes these linkages so that when we expand the base of rights we do not at the same time constrain the space for survival. How do we face this challenge, this contradiction between personal rights of some versus economic rights of others that faces us? How do we make the Cairo agenda implementable? Having established the principles, how do we ensure full implementation? Perhaps one essential ingredient is to arrive at a common understanding of women's human rights that include personal, bodily, economic and development dimensions.
Reference
Government of Pakistan, (1997-8) Economic Survey of Pakistan, Islamabad.
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