Bringing Reproductive Health to a Village in Ghana

A PERSONAL ESSAY BY
MARGARET CATLEY-CARLSON
POPULATION COUNCIL

This is a millennium tale of two locales whose names are pronounced the same: one is Cairo, Egypt, the site of the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development; the other is Kayoro, a settlement in northern Ghana. It is important to understand the effect that the events in one location have had on those in the other. I had a first-hand chance to see the Cairo–Kayoro axis in January 1998.

The Cairo Conference was a large and important gathering that has had a lasting impact in many countries. What made this conference different from others were the people who participated in it and the document that they produced after many meetings and much effort—the Cairo Consensus. There were two groups of major players. One consisted of 183 country delegations, many of them participating for the first time in such a conference, with 3,500 government delegates (80 percent of them men), four heads of state, seven prime ministers, and five vice presidents. Serving as a counterpoint and sometime conscience were 5,000 representatives of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), 80 percent of them women, and over 300 women’s groups from around the world. This conference marked the first time that NGOs were recognized as influential players; some countries actually included NGO representatives in their national delegations for the first time.

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