Coming Soon!

Coming Soon!

Coming Soon!

Social protection programmes are a key strategy for addressing the needs of vulnerable groups, including women, older persons, people living with disabilities, youth, and members of minority and marginalized communities. Social protection programmes aim to mitigate chronic or shock-induced poverty, address social risks, and reduce economic vulnerability by enabling poor people to meet their basic consumption needs and improve their livelihoods. This concurrent session will enable social protection programme implementers and actors share experiences and learn from one another on better approaches to deliver social protection programmes. It will also help to how the role of these programmes in achieving a demographic dividend.

Countries are now generating a wealth population data, but these data have yet to be fully utilized in the formulation of population policies and programmes at sub-national levels, something that was envisaged during the 1994 ICPD. The main obstacle to achieving this goal has been the lack of robust data at sub-national levels and inadequate capacity to conduct small area estimations and modelling using population data. These issues have limited efforts to fully integrate population issues in development planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation. This session will provide a platform for the exchange of knowledge and best practices, where countries can learn from those who have been able to produce and effectively utilize sub-national data.

Achieving a demographic dividend is a key ingredient to achieving the ICPD Programme of Action overall. In many countries, harnessing a demographic dividend can offer major solutions to myriad challenges facing young people today, including access to education, ability to enter the workforce, and ability to save for old age. But countries cannot harness the demographic dividend or achieve the ICPD PoA without the meaningful involvement of young people at every stage in the process. This session will therefore seek to highlight the roles that youth can play to help their countries realize the ICPD Programme of Action, with a specific focus on actions they can take to harness the demographic dividend.

The ICPD Programme of Action and the 2013 Addis Ababa Declaration on Population and Development (AADPD) have together provided a unique opportunity for Africa to take regional action to address population dynamics. They are inspiring Africa’s efforts to harness a demographic dividend, advance human rights and meet the Sustainable Development Goals. The recent ICPD/AADPD regional review reveals an incredible body of evidence about gains, gaps and challenges in the implementation of these frameworks. It highlighted exemplary initiatives that African countries are undertaking to ensure that policy and services address population issues and achieve meaningful development results, particularly for marginalized and underserved populations. Although the continent has frameworks setting out region-specific guidance and most African countries have explicit population policies, they lack comprehensive strategies and budgets to support the implementation and monitoring of these plans. This concurrent session will provide an opportunity for countries to share knowledge and experiences in the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of policies and programmes that respond to their demographic trends.

Violence against women and girls is one of the most pervasive human rights violations in the world. In conflict, humanitarian and disaster situations, women and girls are especially vulnerable to different forms of gender-based violence including rape, confinement and sexually slavery. This violence causes enormous physical and emotional suffering to individuals, but its consequences do not stop there. It also generates shock waves across all of society, exacerbating the spread of HIV/AIDs, straining health systems, and taking a toll on whole economies. Despite national and international legal action and conventions to combat gender-based violence and harmful practices, prevalence rates remain high. There is an urgent demand for focused discussion on solutions to end gender-based violence and harmful practices, and this session is dedicated to providing a platform for that purpose. Expect stakeholders to share experiences combating these harms, and to make firm commitments to pave the way towards the vision zero gender-based violence.

The WHO Safe abortion, technical and policy guidance for health systems defines the international standards for the provision of safe abortion services globally. This panel will present regional progress around the achievements towards these standards. This panel will focus on why it is critical to make safe abortion universally accessible if we want to achieve zero preventable maternal deaths. Panellists will argue that motherhood must be voluntary, which means safe abortion should be treated as a legitimate form of healthcare, available on request from public health services, in line with WHO best practice guidelines. The panel will review the evidence on unintended and unwanted pregnancy globally. We will show that 25 years on, it is clear that increases in the use of contraception and provision of post-abortion care alone, without make abortions safe and legal, have not and will not prevent unwanted pregnancies or complications and deaths from unsafe abortion. The session will focus on how countries must fulfil ICPD's commitments on women's health and rights through universal access to safe abortion. The panel is convened by the International Campaign for Women's Right to Safe Abortion, with Global Doctors for Choice, Young Activist Network for Abortion Advocacy, Asian-Pacific Resources and Research Centre for Women, Consorcio Latinoamericano contra el Aborto Inseguro (CLACAI), Ipas Africa Alliance, Groupe Tawhida Ben Cheikh Tunisia, and La Mesa por la Vida y la Salud de las Mujeres Colombia.