18 Oct 2017

The United Nations Population Fund assistant representative in Gaborone, Ms Mareledi Segotso has decried growing and disturbing inequality experienced globally which is predominately affecting women.

Making a statement during the launch of The State of the World Population Report 2017 (SWOP) in Gaborone on October 17 under the theme,Worlds Apart: Reproductive Health and Rights in an Age of Inequality, Ms

Segotso noted that this inequality was not only about money, but instead it was also about power, rights and opportunities.

She told the attendants, among them Minister of Health and Wellness, Ms Dorcas Makgato that this inequality had many dimensions that fed on each other.

She noted that one dimension of inequality that had received too little attention was in the enjoyment or denial of reproductive rights and the effects of that on half of humanity.

Ms Segotso regretted that in most developing countries the poorest women had the least power to decide whether, when or how often to become pregnant, adding that they also had the least access to quality care during pregnancy and childbirth.

She noted that this inequality had lasting repercussions for women’s health, work life and earnings potential and for their contribution to their nations’ development and elimination of poverty.  

One teething problem, she said was that contraception was often out of reach for the poor, particularly those who were less educated and living in rural areas, pointing that this put women and adolescent girls at greater risk of unintended pregnancy.

She acknowledged that an unintended pregnancy could set in motion a lifetime of missed opportunities and unrealised potential, trapping a woman and her children in an endless cycle of poverty.

Ms Segotso noted that while economic inequality divided countries into haves and have-nots, inequalities in reproductive health and rights and gender inequality divided people into cans and cannots.

“A woman or adolescent girl who cannot enjoy her reproductive rights is one who cannot stay healthy, cannot complete her education, cannot find decent work outside the home and cannot chart her own economic future,” she said.

She therefore said the SWOP Report 2017 in this regard made the case that unless nations reduced inequalities in women’s reproductive health and rights, the world would fail to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the reduction to poverty would be blocked.

Ms Segotso added that investments were needed not only to meet all the unmet demand for family planning, but also in services, such as child care, that enabled women to enter or remain in the paid labour force and protect them from the so-called motherhood penalty.

She said if poor women were disadvantaged, poor adolescents, especially girls are even more so, noting that investments in adolescent girls are critical.

She said she visited a few secondary schools in Gantsi and Bobonong districts a few months ago and one of school principals said they lost about 30 girls per year due to pregnancy.

The harrowing thing about this, she said was that a significant number of these girls did not go back to school after birth despite the existence of the return to school policy and were therefore trapped in a life of limited choice, missed opportunity, untapped talent and potential.

In the meantime, Ms Segotso said her organisation was committed to a future where zero was the only acceptable number in problems affecting women and the girl child.

They want zero preventable maternal deaths, zero unintended pregnancies and zero gender-based violence and harmful practices, including female genital mutilation and child marriage.ENDS