Jordan Times
Wednesday, July 14, 2006
Conference concludes
with call for action to help 'voiceless’ women
By Rana Husseini
DEAD SEA — Women leaders and activists who met to
discuss maternal and newborn mortality on Tuesday agreed it was time to put an
end to the death of pregnant women during birth.
“Every minute a woman in the world dies from childbirth. We women of the world
want to say ‘stop the unjust and unnecessary deaths of women.’ We are determined
to stop it,” Children’s Defence Fund President Marian Wright Edelman said during
the closing session of a conference on newborn mortality and girls’ education.
“We know from this conference the hope we can bring, the dreams we can salvage,
the knowledge we can share, the successful policies and practices we can scale
up, the power we can multiply and the wills we can build by uniting our demands
for justice for the voiceless,” she said.
Collaborative action and a strategic long-term action plan are necessary to
achieve this, according to Edelman.
Participants at the conference agreed that the international community “can no
longer ignore these issues and [must] mobilise the outrage over the fact that 11
million women and children die needlessly each year and 100 million children
lack education into positive action,” she added.
The three-day conference, Mobilising for Action, also witnessed the launching of
the Global Women’s Action Network for Children (GWANC), to ensure that the needs
and rights of women and children are met.
“We are committed to mobilise the network to ensure that maternal and infant
mortality and girls’ education are a top concern of government leaders,
investors, decision and policy makers around the world,” Edelman told over 300
women leaders, activists, journalists and lawyers.
The conference spokesperson, Senator Leila Sharaf, said the GWANC would target
two or three nations to accelerate the rate of progress on its two goals through
a range of advocacy, leadership and community capacity building strategies and
infrastructure development.
The selection of the countries, to be made within 90 days, will be based on
criteria that include need, readiness and will for change and the likelihood of
success, drawing on all available research, according to Sharaf.
The GWANC will establish an interactive website providing up-to-date information
on best practices, current and relevant research in a user-friendly form, and a
calendar of important global and national events, the senator added.
In her closing remarks, Her Majesty Queen Rania spoke of “the millions of women
who are off-course, through no fault of their own. Women who are lost to the
world everyday... who did not have access to professional care during
childbirth... girls who are doing housework rather than homework... babies who
died for want of a knit cap.”
“By engaging today’s young girls and showing them the power they have within, we
will help save the next generation of at-risk mothers and babies,” the Queen
added.
The launch of the GWANC is the first marker, she said, “but the real measure of
our success will not be what we have accomplished here, but what we will do when
we leave.”
“So, as you head home, let us remember... that to the world, each of us may be
just one woman,” Queen Rania said, “But to one woman, we may be the world.”