UNFPA officials are calling on governments to address the high rates of maternal death, and to find the root causes behind them. Deputy Representative of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) for the English and Dutch-speaking Caribbean, Jaime Nadal-Roig, said in a recent interview:

"This should be from the perspective of reproductive health, which is more holistic. we have to look at root causes of the problem and the broader picture."

Tackling the specific causes of maternal complications, such as fistula incontinence, hypertensive disease and obstructed labor, can help reduce numbers. RH Reality Check has a piece up addressing the fact that nearly 13% maternal deaths that are caused by unsafe abortions. Here's a snippet:

Reducing maternal deaths is a laudable goal, and one that must be achieved if the rest of the millennium development goals are to be realized. But reductions in maternal mortality can never be fully realized unless the global community of donors, governments, and public health starts including abortion in realistic approaches to protecting women's health. If the world wants to promote development, it needs to start promoting comprehensive reproductive health care.

Read the full piece here.

As Liberia recovers from a decade of civil war, the country's top UN official is not only pushing for an advancement in women's rights, but also saying that women's empowerment is critical to improving peace and development:

Addressing participants at the start of a five-day national women's conference in the capital, Monrovia, the Secretary-General's Special Representative in Liberia, Ellen Margrethe Løj, yesterday highlighted the need to take the message of women's empowerment and the advancement of human rights to the community level.

'When discussing these issues, ensure that they are not only discussed with intellectual women in Monrovia; make sure that all women of Liberia are involved in these efforts,' she told the gathering, which included UN and Government officials, diplomats, local women leaders, female traditional and religious leaders and members of civil society and non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

Løj also addressed women's participation in agriculture in reference to the rise in food prices, as well as the prevalence of rape in Liberia, which is currently the single most frequently committed serious crime in the nation.

While the UN tackles the global food crisis, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour reminds us that marginalized groups must not be left out any efforts made, and the equality of food distribution and analysis of community needs must be ensured:

"More fundamentally, and for the more medium and longer term, the underlying inequalities and inabilities to access food must be addressed by a comprehensive solution. . . When we focus on those most in need, we must include not only the poorest but also those that are particularly vulnerable to discrimination on any other grounds, including gender, ethnicity, or disability."

She included that all voices within those communities, whether it be directly or through local organizations, must be heard.

I like this woman.

Via UN News Centre:

Although over 6 million children returned to Afghanistan's classrooms a month ago at the start of a new school year, United Nations agencies said today that half of the war-torn country's young people are excluded from receiving an education, the bulk of them girls.

This is the case even though the enrolment of girls, who were barred from going to school under the repressive Taliban regime, has increased significantly in the past five years, according to the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF).

'We still have 1.2 million girls of school age who do not have access to schools,' said Catherine Mbengue, UNICEF Country Representative in Afghanistan. 'We have a lot of work to do to make sure all conditions are met so that schools are friendly to girls.'

UN agencies have been working with the government to build new schools, conduct teacher trainings (particularly female teachers), and talking to communities about the importance of education in attempts to fill this huge gap.

This week is actually Global Action Week for Education. Their "Education for All" goal has a large focus specifically on education for girls, whom are effected disproportionately throughout the world.

While over 10 million women and children in developing countries continue to die every year from preventable and treatable causes, a new report released today by UN agencies and partners calls for improved health care systems to reduce maternal and child deaths:

'Tracking Progress in Maternal, Newborn and Child Survival' finds that few of the 68 developing countries that account for 97 per cent of maternal and child deaths worldwide are providing the necessary health care to save lives.

The 2008 report was released today as leading global health experts, policy-makers and parliamentarians convene in Cape Town, South Africa, to address further efforts to slash maternal and child mortality by 2015, part of a set of internationally-agreed targets known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

And this is not to mention that donor funding for maternal, newborn and child health has actually increased over the past few years. So while there has been much improvement, the fact that health care needs are so high in these countries still result in health care programs being "grossly unfunded," says the report.

A new UN-commissioned report says that women are discriminated against in nearly every nation in the world:

It says that this is despite the fact that 185 UN member states pledged to outlaw laws favouring men by 2005.

It adds that 70% of the world's poor are women and they own just 1% of the world's titled land.

The report, which was prepared for UN Human Right Commissioner Louise Arbour, says rape within marriage has still not been made a crime in 53 nations.

The report was prepared by Fareda Banda, a law professor at London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). She says that there are many more discriminatory laws against women, including statutes on divorce, maternity benefits and pensions. Even seemingly harmless laws like the legal age for marriage has a huge impact on girls' and women's lives:

"Many states still have different ages of marriage for young women than they have for young men, and the age for girls is always lower then the age for boys. . . This leads to violations, for example of a girls' right education, if she has to leave school at 14 to get married, and this impacts upon her life chances . . . It ends up being a life-long violation of her rights in terms of forfeiting education, having children too early, possibly being damaged herself."

For more information on how marriage at an early age affects girls, check out this video by the UNFPA. In the meantime, let's hope this report will serve as a serious call to the UN member states to keep their promise and eliminate these harmful laws; the world's women can't afford to wait any longer.

A UN report released today shows significant progress in treating children with AIDS and preventing mother-to-child transmission of HIV, but not without a call for greater efforts.

In 2005, only 11 percent of women were getting drugs to prevent transmission. Thanks to UNICEF's Unite for Children, Unite Against AIDS initiative, 31 percent are now getting treatment. There's also been a 70 percent increase in children who are receiving anti-retroviral drugs (ARVs) to 127,000 per year. "That’s enormous progress," says UNICEF Chief of HIV and AIDS Jimmy Kolker.

But obviously more efforts are needed. The report identifies improvements and challenges in four key areas: preventing HIV transmission from mothers to children (PMTCT); providing paediatric treatment, preventing infection among adolescents and young people; and protecting and supporting children affected by AIDS.

The report also addresses how various gender injustices call for women's rights efforts to be embedded within the work being done to decrease the occurrence of PMTCT. Examples include how domestic violence is often a huge barrier to routine testing programs, or the ways that cultural stigmatization prevents many women from seeking PMTCT services. All are addressed in the report, as well as new working strategies to further the progress already made.

Make sure to check out the full report.

Last week, the United Nations Population Fund joined civil society groups, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the Government in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to launch a campaign raising public awareness about the prevalence of sexual violence in the DRC.

The campaign will run for the next month with a number of efforts including marches, conferences, forums, school events and endeavors to popularize laws against sexual violence.

There are 1,100 rape cases reported each month in the DRC. Additionally, victims of sexual violence are often left with little to access to help. Yakin Erturk, the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women, says not only that the justice system is in "deplorable conditions," but that victims often have to pay access to the courts, which she describes as "a major obstacle to justice."

The United Nations has called out the Sudanese government for committing mass rapes of women and girls in Darfur in a new report released today.

The UN high commissioner for human rights, Louise Arbour, released the report stating that President Omar al-Bashir's administration is providing help and support to the Arab janjaweed militia, who are responsible for looting at least three towns, raping girls and women and killing at least 115 people last month. Over 30,000 people have been displaced as a result as well. Via the UN's News Centre:

The report describes extensive looting during and after the attacks, and catalogues 'consistent and credible accounts' of rape committed by armed men in uniform.

'These actions violated the principle of distinction stated in international humanitarian law, failing to distinguish between civilian objects and military objective,' the report concludes.

On Friday, the day before International Women's Day, a UN Committee expressed concern about "wide racial disparities" in sexual and reproductive health in the United States, reports RH Reality Check.

Remarks were made concerning this issue at the end of a two-week session in Geneva, Switzerland, where the UN reviewed the nation's observance of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), a human rights agreement which requires countries to take pro-active measures to address racial inequalities.

While a number of issues were addressed concerning racial discrimination in the U.S., such as racial segregation in schools and discrimination in the criminal justice system, there was also a focus on severe reproductive health disparities between women of color and white women. Among those were these findings by the Center for Reproductive Rights:

• African-American women are nearly four times more likely to die in childbirth than white women, 23 times more likely to be infected with HIV/AIDS and 14 times more likely to die from the disease.
• American-Indian/Alaskan Native women are over 5 times more likely than white women to have chlamydia and over 7 times more likely to contract syphilis.
• The unplanned pregnancy rate among Latinas is twice the national average; and Latinas are much more likely to contract human papillomavirus, the infection that leads to cervical cancer.

The Committee gave the U.S. the following recommendations to improve the status of these serious disparities in reproductive health care: improve access to pre- and post-natal care, including the elimination of eligibility barriers to Medicaid; improve access to contraceptive and family planning methods; and lastly, provide comprehensive sexual education aimed at the prevention of unintended pregnancies and STIs.

UN Dispatch is pleased to announce that Feministing's Vanessa Valenti will join the Dispatch team and offer posts on global women's issues. Welcome aboard Vanessa!

As Saturday marks International Women's Day, there are numerous efforts happening to increase awareness around the status of women across the globe. One of these is the "Handbook for the Protection of Women and Girls" a new publication released today by the UN Refugee Agency that is designed to promote gender equality using a rights -- and community -- based approach.

Replacing the UNHCR's 1991 "Guidelines on the Protection of Refugee Women", this document acknowledges and condemns "a massive culture of neglect and denial about violence against women and girls," develops strategies to address the challenges that women and girls face as well as sets out international legal standards in the area.

Perhaps most importantly, the handbook not only lays out strategies to ensure the protection of women and girls, but also pushes for gender equality "through targeted actions to empower women and girls in the civil, political and economic sectors."

Click here for the handbook in full.

--By Vanessa Valenti