By ANTHONY DEUTSCH Associated Press Writer
THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) -- Cash shortages mean that equal rights, health care and family planning for women are still a long way off in many countries, delegates told a world population conference Wednesday.
In Nigeria, women's deaths connected to childbirth have soared to three percent of all deaths in recent years while development funds have dried up under international sanctions and domestic recession, a family planning official said.
``This calls for immediate action and a rethinking and reassessment not only of the loans but of the (lending) policy itself,'' said Grace Delano, executive director of Nigeria's Association for Reproduction and Family Health.
She was speaking at the Hague Forum, a U.N. conference where 1,500 delegates from 180 countries are taking stock of successes and failures five years into an ambitious 20-year program aimed at slowing global population growth.
Delegates from developing nations have been complaining since the forum opened Monday that a lack of funds is hampering their efforts to put the program into action.
A decade ago, maternal fatalities -- childbirth-related deaths of women -- accounted for 800 of each 100,000 deaths in Nigeria, or less than one percent, Delano said. Now they are more than 3,000 of every 100,000, she said.
In North America the rate is 9 of every 100,000 deaths, said Jill Scheffield, president of the U.S.-based organization Family Care International.
The World Bank withdrew its funding of population projects in Nigeria last year because of its policy of restricting loans to politically unstable governments.
The Cairo consensus, as it is known, was an agreement between 179 countries to make access to reproductive health care (unfettered abortion) and family planning services a basic right by the year 2015.
Meeting at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, Egypt, governments from around the world also pledged to reduce infant, child and maternal mortality and bolster education, particularly for women and girls.
A key part of the agreement was to increase annual global spending on population projects to $17 billion by the year 2000 and to $22 billion by 2015. However, so far only a handful of nations are meeting their spending targets.
In Jamaica, government and voluntary organizations are concentrating their scant resources on health care for adolescents, said Easton Williams of the Jamaican delegation.
``The major objective is to develop reproductive health care programs. There is an urgent need to break the link between reproduction and poverty,'' Williams said.
The Hague meeting ends Friday.