On the eve of World Population Day, July 11, the UN representation in Ukraine and the State Statistics Committee held a joint conference. The theme of this year’s observance, reducing poverty by improving reproductive health, is focused on the role of family planning, safe motherhood, and the prevention of HIV/AIDS in the war on poverty. The chief idea of the United Nations Population Fund Agency (UNFPA) strategy is simple: what can lower world population growth is increased education, access to reproductive health commodities and, conscious family planning. This creates favorable opportunities for further progress: when married couples face a dilemma, many of them will decide to form small but physically healthy families because a smaller number of children makes it possible to invest more in each of them. Accordingly, a smaller number of dependent people and, moreover, the possibility of reaching a higher educational level will have a beneficial effect on the economic growth of generations to come. UNFPA Executive Director Thoraya Ahmed Obaid says in his message that the countries that have invested in health and education, enabling women to make their own fertility choices, have registered faster economic growth than those that have not.
Oleh Voronenko, UNFPA program coordinator assistant, briefed the audience that since 1997 the organizations has been carrying out a total of eight programs worth $2 million in Ukraine, including ones on HIV-infection control and the establishment of family planning and reproductive health centers in all Ukrainian regions. He also said that in the years UNFPA carried out its programs Ukraine has seen a drop in maternal mortality from 36 to 15% and a reduction of the birth/abortion ratio to 106 to 100 against the previous 120 to 100. State Statistics Committee deputy chairperson Natalia Vlasenko announced that Ukrainians officially considered poor accounted for 27.8% of the population in 1999 and the unemployment level ranged from 6.1% in the capital to 21.5% in Volyn oblast. However, in spite of the abundant information on the ways of controlling the number of the global population and on the results of the latest census in Ukraine, it still remains unclear how the concept could be applied to Ukraine: the conference heard no constructive ideas on it. All the participants managed to do was outline the urgent problems in terms of succinct but eloquent statements: Ukraine’s annual per capita health care expenditure is half that of other states with a similar level of development; the syphilis rate is rising among teenagers; while maternal mortality in Ukraine is five times as high as in the developed countries. Moreover, in 1999 figures again, more than a third of our citizens had inadequate nourishment; therefore experts believe that about 15% of Ukrainians under five display an inferior stature-to-age ratio.
