Investing in sexual and reproductive health saves lives

Transcript: This September, Guttmacher joined key conversations at the 80th United Nations General Assembly in New York. This year's session also marked the 30th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration. 

Thirty years ago, the world came together to affirm that the rights of women and girls are not separate, secondary or negotiable. They are human rights. The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action is the most ambitious global political commitment on women's rights ever achieved and it has helped to power advances in some critical areas: legal protection, political participation, education, maternal mortality, recognizing the need to tackle violence against women as a global priority and more. But progress has been slow and uneven and no nation has achieved full equality for women and girls. We need strong, visible support at the highest levels and concrete plans backed by real investment. 

And that urgency really shaped this year's discussions, as a shifting donor landscape and a growing backlash against women's rights threatens to undo decades of progress on sexual and reproductive health and rights and gender equality. 

I want to ask you first about maximizing impact with limited resources. I know something that's front of mind for you. Tell us, how can policymakers and stakeholders prioritize family planning investments to reach women who have unmet needs in a time when there's a downturn in funding? 

Our new estimates tell us that the cost of meeting all women's needs for contraceptive care annually would amount to $14 billion US right now and that's a lot of money. But then, I think, more important, I want to hone in on the concept of need. We've moved into defining a much more nuanced measure of need, one that takes account of the fact that women want to prevent pregnancies, but we're now starting to look at the number of women who have explicitly said, "Yes, I would like to use a method, or I intend to use one in future." And why is this really critical? Understanding and segmenting out this smaller subgroup is very important for policymakers, because when you're trying to prioritize limited investments, this is the right first subgroup to go to within your national budget. And so, if you're thinking of the narrowest definition of "Where should I put my funds as a policymaker?" those are the women you want to target. You're going to get a lot of bang for your buck. It's not going to be wasted. And so, drawing on our data, we see that adolescent women who express this new nuanced need, which we're calling unmet demand, have three times as much unmet demand as all other women of reproductive age. And so, when governments are thinking of prioritizing investment, you want to find a way to get it into the hands of those people. Yet amid these challenges, our discussions also explored how to build a better future, strengthening health systems through sustainable funding, fostering solidarity across sectors and envisioning together a feminist future where SRHR is universally accessible.