Widen People’s Choices For Development

The world has undergone far-reaching changes in the past two decades. With the growing recognition of population, development and environmental interdependence, national development policies and strategic plans in low-income countries are focusing on sustainable human development. This is essentially a process of enlarging people’s choices aiming at leading a long and healthy life with a decent standard of living. Other critical choices include political freedom, guaranteed human rights and self-respect. 

The International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) was held in Cairo, Egypt in 1994. This was landmark event in terms of considering a new perspective on population, human rights, sexual and reproductive health, gender equality and sustainable development. There is global consensus that fulfilling the rights of women and girls is central to sustainable human development. 

Useful framework

Undoubtedly, the ICPD inspires a rights-based agenda in which people are placed at the heart of sustainable development. The ICPD Programme of Action (PoA) provides a useful framework to countries in enhancing the quality of life and well-being of every individual and promoting human development. More importantly, it underscores the interrelationship between development policies and programmes, human rights, and economic and social development. Considering the priorities of the ICPD, many governments have envisioned an ambitious goal to deliver inclusive, equitable and sustainable development. This has importantly guided policy and helped secure advances in equality and empowerment for women, health and life expectancy, and education for girls.

More importantly, the ICPD is guided by overarching principles of human dignity and rights. Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Despite persistent inequalities, the world acutely faces new challenges and opportunities related to population and development, changing age structures, rapid urbanisation and migration. The new demographic challenges are profoundly influenced by growing environmental pressures, including the urgent threat of climate change. 

Still, poverty, political instability, food insecurity, poor health system, limited access to water and sanitation, natural disasters and pandemics like COVID-19 are some of the critical challenges for many low-income countries. At the core, the ICPD agenda and goals are largely based on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) indicators and targets so that periodic assessment and reporting is essential to track the progress on national commitments and priority areas of action. The participatory and inclusive consultations with a range of relevant partners provide opportunity to reflect the progress, identify implementation gaps, emerging challenges and priorities related to population and development.

Additionally, the ICPD has prioritised key thematic areas that include poverty reduction and employment, health, sexual and reproductive health, gender equality and women’s empowerment, migration, urbanisation. Nepal has made some remarkable achievements in creating a supportive policy environment to implement strategic development plans, relevant guidelines and frameworks at all levels. According to a recent economic survey – 2022/23, about 15.1 per cent of the population is below the poverty line. Multi-dimensional poverty has declined to 17.4 per cent. More importantly, the overall literacy rate has increased to 76 per cent which is a significant progress in education sector. Compared to past decades, the human development index has slightly increased to 0.602 in 2023. Similarly, access to essential health and nutrition services has significantly improved across the provinces.

Unfortunately, the progress is still slow and uneven across the provinces.  For example, maternal mortality ratio is 207 in Lumbini province which is the highest across the provinces. Similarly, in case of child nutrition, stunting in Karnali province is 36 per cent which is still very high. Therefore, provincial governments need to critically review their development policies, priorities and practices of resource allocation to ensure critical programmatic and investment gaps in health and population sector are sufficiently addressed in their annual plans and budget.  

During recent consultations with some of the parliamentarians in Lumbini province, there is an encouraging willingness and response for enhancing political leadership and commitments in implementation of the ICPD priorities at province and local level. The role of parliamentarians is vitally important in developing public policies which are largely inclusive, gender-sensitive and evidence-informed to ensure effectiveness and efficiency.     

Synergic outcomes

As of now, investments in children, adolescents and youth are still inadequate. There are other important social development issues such as poverty, child marriage, and gender inequality. In order to effectively address the multitude of challenges in population and development, inter-sector coordination and collaboration is necessary for creating synergic outcomes in health and population sector. Role of civil society needs to be further enhanced for their enormous contributions in empowering women and girls to access basic socio-economic services.  There is still a long way to go for achieving the targets of the ICPD and the SDGs.

Nepal’s health and population policies, strategic plans and guidelines provide a useful roadmap for provincial and local governments, the effective implementation is a key concern in the federal context. Strategies for capacity building of local governments should be a high priority agenda for development partners to provide their technical support in the broader areas of population and development. To sum up, people-centred public policies and strategic interventions are key to enlarge people’s choices for sustainable human development. 

 (Research scholar in anthropology, Bhandari writes on health and development issues.)