Declines in fertility levels evident in Africa, notes UN Population Fund.

• Author: Ofosu-Amaah, Virginia
• Position: Includes related article on the need for family planning services in Africa

The Africa regional meeting, held in Harare, Zimbabwe, from 10 to 14 November 1997, brought together all the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) Africa representatives, deputy representatives, Country Support Team directors and advisors, selected national programme officers and directors of UNFPA-supported regional training institutions and participants from Headquarters.

The meeting took place three years after the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), which was held in Cairo, Egypt in 1994, and two years after a similar Africa regional meeting, held in Accra in August 1995, to define strategies to implement the Programme of Action, adopted by 179 countries and elaborated at the ICPD, taking into account the specifics and context of the Africa region. The 1994 landmark Conference and the Programme of Action underscored the integral and mutually reinforcing linkages between population and development and the urgency of meeting the needs of individual women and men. It also promoted a human rights framework and emphasized the centrality of the human person as the subject of development, marking a distinct shift from a focus on demographic targets to a focus on people-centered development.

Two years after Accra, there was a need to take stock and assess achievements, constraints and lessons learned from the implementation of the ICPD goals in the Africa region in order to reinforce or reorient the programme strategies, where necessary, and to chart a course for the twenty-first century.

The Harare meeting, therefore, reviewed recent developments in the United Nation, including the UN reform and its impact on UNFPA's work, its new programme guidelines in the framework of further decentralization to the country offices, the UNFPA experience with national execution and its role in emergency situations. The meeting also reviewed the role of UNFPA in capacity building at the country level, in encouraging South-to-South cooperation, as well as in advocacy for such issues as reproductive rights, including violence against women and children, and the promotion of gender equality and women's empowerment. The status of implementation of the three main areas of UNFPA's work - reproductive health, population and development strategies, and advocacy - after the ICPD were reviewed in detail. The results will be fed into the ICPD + 5 review process. It was observed that much had been achieved and encouraging signs of declines in...