Chronicling UNFPA's technical support in South and West Asia

Despite making a considerable progress in expanding access to reproductive health (RH) services, the South Asia and West Asia region still faces a grave concern pertaining to their quality, extent of utilisation and desired outcomes. 

The region with its enormous human potential also presents very serious challenges concerning issues of gender and social transformation. Also, the availability of data for development remains surprisingly poor.

Much data has been collected over the past for MDG monitoring but a closer look at the situation reveals appalling discrepancies between indicators derived from different sources.

In order to help developing countries respond better to problems and challenges of population and development, United Nations Fund for Population (UNFPA) in the early 90s, embarked on a new initiative called Country Support Teams (CSTs) that played a catalytic role in forging greater South-South collaboration as well as increased capacity building at national levels.

The initiative was aimed at building capacities through technical units and individual experts in RH and family planning services, adolescent sexual and reproductive health, behavioural change communication, gender, culture and human rights.

CSTs for Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Arab States and Europe focussed on bringing high-quality and timely technical assistance closer to developing countries.

A human-centred approach

Over the 16 years of CST’s existence, the concept of population and development has changed significantly. Earlier, it was closely linked with population control and family planning.

With CST’s involvement, the focus has gone from demographic-target-driven approaches to individual needs and rights-based RH approaches.

At the national level, CST has also extensively contributed towards monitoring Millennium Development Goal (MDG) indicators.

In a latest report titled: Between Mountains and Sea, summarising UNFPA's work in the South and West Asian, Dr. Wasim Zaman, Director CST, Kathmandu, says,"The idea was to promote a population and development agenda, including the role of women in the region which is home to half of world’s poor and has the largest conflict-affected population."

The International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) held in 1994 at Cairo noted that the world needed to advance human well-being by linking notions of development to those of population, women’s advancement and RH.

Linking gender

Thus, the focus of CST technical assistance shifted to promoting a human-centred approach to development policies by improving the status of women and capacity building activities for the management of population programmes.

Post ICPD, the concept of reproductive health along with its gender and socio-cultural dimension gained prominence.

In this regard, one of the pioneering works undertaken by CST was on socio-cultural research in the region.

In this context, a special initiative on “engendering census” was launched in South and West Asian countries with a view to improve the availability of data on women.

Another area of intervention was conflict-affected regions. CST supported programmes in Sri Lanka, Maldives, Nepal and Pakistan to deal with women and other issues in the context of emergencies.

Prevention of HIV/AIDS among young people has been a specific area of focus for CST support both at the national and regional levels. A series of training and knowledge-exchange programmes on reproductive health and HIV/AIDS were organised by CST.

Policy change

In early 2000, a dramatic shift occurred in the modality of providing technical assistance. This shift was from a service-delivery role to policy-related activities and increased advocacy on the need to invest in RH.

CST initiated a process of developing communication strategies that incorporated target-audience segmentation and behaviour-specific issues.  Focus was placed on developing capacities of country office staff and national counterparts in planning and conducting research and surveys.

CST also supported research and curriculum development on population studies in various universities across South Asia. It spearheaded efforts to include sexual and reproductive health into school curricula and building capacity of teachers to start counselling services.

Three notable achievements were made under CST. As a result of its efforts, the Bhutan government conducted the country’s first-ever census in 2005; consensus was achieved throughout South Asia to increase the number of skilled birth attendants; and several countries in the region have moved towards action against gender-based violence with technical support from CST. 

Over the years, CST reviews of the HIV/AIDS situation and advocacy of related programmes and policies in the region have helped in gaining support of religious leaders in Bangladesh with regard to reproductive health and gender.

Still, much more needs to be done in terms of enhanced operational research, engaging with communities, refining monitoring and evaluation tools and integrating strategic communication with the main sexual, reproductive, health, gender and environment programmes.

Now, as the UNFPA make a significant departure from this existing CST system towards relocating regional offices from New York to respective regions themselves, the challenge is to continue to provide objective and high-quality technical assistance.

This would require programme managers and technical experts to coordinate more effectively with their country offices and engage at policy level.

It is also imperative to ensure that technical assistance being provided is being acted upon and that monitoring and evaluation mechanism is well-designed and truly objective.