I am delighted to be able to join you here on World Population Day.

There are many powerful advocates for sexual and reproductive health here this evening. I would like to pay particular tribute to the work of Christine and Jenny’s groups, which champion these issues so well and for which I want to thank you.

We’ve seen some encouraging progress in reducing maternal mortality over the last few years.  And the new direction in US policy towards sexual and reproductive health – including overturning the Global Gag Rule and restoring US funding to the UN Population Fund - marks an incredibly important step forward.

But despite this progress, we are still significantly off track for achieving Millennium Development Goal 5 – to improve maternal and reproductive health. 

It is a tragic fact that one woman dies in childbirth every minute. This is devastating for their families and communities. And when a mother dies in childbirth, the cost isn’t just her own life, it’s also the cost to her orphaned child, who is five times as likely to die before their fifth birthday.

Over the last 12 months the global financial crisis has made the challenge of meeting the Millennium Development Goals, including MDG 5, even harder. 

Developing countries are suffering from falling levels of investment; reduced remittance flows; and in some cases, cuts in development aid. And this at a time when rapid population growth is already placing a massive strain on governments ability to deliver basic services to their people – such as education, health, water and sanitation - the services needed for them to achieve and sustain the progress envisaged by the Millennium Development Goals.

As under-resourced governments find it harder to pay for health and education, women and girls are often the first to suffer.

Every year 10 million more girls than boys are denied the chance of a primary education – resulting in over half a billion women around the world who can’t read or write.
 
Women make up two thirds of the people living with the HIV virus in sub-Saharan Africa and globally, every year, 87 million women face the news of an unplanned pregnancy. Why?

Because lack of education, lack of services, lack of security, and lack of choice about what happens to them makes women more vulnerable to HIV and unwanted pregnancy.
 
And as the global economy contracts, women are also finding it harder to find employment. In the female-dominated Bengali garment industry, women are losing their jobs. Up to 300,000 jobs have been lost in Bangladesh in the last six months. As a result, more women are working in unlicensed sweatshops, in poor conditions and for little money. 

Falling family income means that girls who should be completing their education are being pulled out of school and forced to work or look after younger siblings.

And poverty can also force women into prostitution, or reduce their freedom to leave a violent relationship.
One recent study found that women whose husbands were unemployed for extended periods were three times more likely to be abused. And women who experience violence are up to three times more likely to acquire HIV.

To address these issues, DFID is funding programmes which provide support and protection for vulnerable women and girls.

For example, in Eastern Uganda, we are supporting the work of the UK based charity Mifumi to tackle domestic violence.

And in Jigawa State in Northern Nigeria our support for community policing initiatives has improved security for women, giving them more freedom and greater control of their lives.

Poverty also limits the choices women have when they become pregnant. Every year, some 20 million women are scared enough to risk an unsafe abortion.  And more than 500,000 women die as a consequence of being pregnant.
 
To prevent tragedies like this, we are working to improve access to family planning and training more midwives. For example in Nepal, DFID has helped to scale up the National Safe Motherhood programme from 9 to 75 districts – effectively nationwide coverage. As a result, more women can now access family planning, visit skilled birth attendants, and have safe-abortions. Since we began supporting the programme 10 years ago, maternal deaths in Nepal have fallen by around 20%.

Giving women access to family planning enables them to make choices about when to start their families and how many children to have. And it gives them more control over their lives, so they can choose to get a job and earn more money for their families.

Family planning is also an example of highly effective aid. Studies show that each dollar invested in contraceptive services saves up to $4 in expenditures on maternal and newborn health and as much as $31 in social services and other costs.

The world is now home to the largest generation of adolescents in history – there are 1.75 billion young people aged between 10 and 24.

The need for sexual and reproductive health services and supplies such as condoms and contraception has never been greater.

So in 2008, DFID committed to provide £6 billion in support of health systems and services up to 2015, with an emphasis on efforts to improve family planning and support sexual and reproductive health. And we have committed an additional £100 million over 5 years through the UN Population Fund to improve family planning.  

To give you an idea of what our funding delivers on the ground, DFID is providing nearly 60,000 condoms every hour, helping to reduce unwanted pregnancies and halt the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.

I want to pay tribute to the work that Gill Greer and her staff at the International Planned Parenthood Federation are doing to champion the neglected services which are vital to protect sexual and reproductive health and rights. 

For example, through projects which enable rural and marginalized women to access safe abortion services in Nepal. On World Population day last year we committed more than £40 million over five years to support the IPPF, and we continue to strongly support them.

However we know that we need to do more. 

Together with other global leaders, last year Gordon Brown launched the High Level Task Force on Innovative International Financing for Health Systems. The Task Force will help to mobilise extra money to support stronger health systems; contributing to the funding needed for over one million extra health workers, and for the additional costs of ensuring that 400 million extra births take place in quality assured clinics.

We believe it is the role of the state to guarantee basic services to their citizens. Which is why we provide long-term funding to hire teachers and nurses, get books to schools and drugs to clinics, and build up infrastructure in developing countries. In Uganda for example, UK support direct to governments to provide free public services has yielded dramatic results in terms of increased access to services for the poor.

And in the White Paper we launched last week, we reaffirmed our commitment to increase our development assistance to over £9 billion by next year, and invest half our global bilateral aid in public services like health, education and sanitation. And we will press the international community for more support to save 6 million mothers and babies by 2015.  

Conclusion

Women are at the heart of communities. They are at the heart of a community’s culture, its economy, and its future. And in their role as mothers they shape their communities more than anyone else.

Virtually everything we are trying to achieve in terms of poverty reduction depends on the health and well being of women.

So if we are going to be successful in meeting the Millennium Development Goals, women’s rights need to be at the heart of all the programmes we work on.

It’s not difficult to see what we need to do. We have the technology and the know-how. It’s an issue of advocacy and political will.

So I’m very grateful to all of you who tirelessly champion these issues.

I know that in this room, there is that determination, that creativity and that expertise that we will need to help women around the world lift themselves out of poverty.

Together, that is our challenge. But I believe that working together, it can be our achievement.