Workshop on Women's Reproductive Health and Household Food Security in Africa, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 11-13 October 1999

Opening Statement by
P.K. Makinwa-Adebusoye
Director
Food Security and Sustainable Development Division

Dear Colleagues:

It is my honour and privilege to welcome you to the Economic Commission for Africa and to thank you for honouring our invitation to attend the Workshop on Women's Reproductive Health and Household Food Security in Africa. I hope you that in addition to a fruitful meeting, you will have a pleasant stay in Addis Ababa.

Dear Colleagues:

As you all know, women in African countries spend most of their lives fulfulling both productive and reproductive roles. Women combine income-generating work as farmers, food processors, traders and paid employees with child-bearing and rearing with attendant house keeping chores. Successful accomplishment of these activities is necessarily contingent on good health. As the period devoted to child-bearing and child-rearing span the most active parts of the lives of most African women, the focus of this workshop is Reproductive Health.

Attainment of good health is a moral imperative and a worthy end in itself. Good Reproductive Health means the absence of several conditions and experiences that can impair physical and/or mental well being and it involves the following basic elements: "responsible reproductive/sexual behaviour, widely available family planning services, effective maternal care and safe motherhood, effective control of reproductive tracts infections (including sexually transmitted disease), prevention and management of infertility, elimination of unsafe abortion, and treatment of malignancies of reproductive organs".¹

Besides saving women's lives, Reproductive Health including family planning saves children's lives, ensures protection against sexually transmitted infections (STIs), including HIV/AIDs and contributes to slower population growth. The latter helps protect the environment and aids development.

The well documented, enormous contributions of African women to crop production, food processing and household food security including availability of nutrious meals, is yet another compelling reason for carefully designed policies and programmes to safeguard women's Reproductive Health.

Dear Colleagues:

As most available studies have focussed on the linkages between Reproductive Health and women's reproductive roles through linkages to maternal, infant and child mortality, population growth and development, this Workshop is designed to focus attention on the linkages between Reproductive Health and women's vital productive role in ensuring household food security.

This is a challenging task. The multi-dimensional nature of Reproductive Health and the multiple spheres of household food security greatly increases the complexity of any research on the linkages between Reproductive Health and food security. There is, therefore, the need for focus and specificity in the formulation of research questions to obtain scientifically based, credible findings.

In addition to your own diverse backgrounds and areas of expertise, there are several working papers that will aid your deliberations. The first, "Relationships between women's reproductive health and household food security", is a general paper that attempts to identify some research priorities while the others focus on important segments of household food security and on the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Together, these papers should elicit discussions on areas for worthwhile research and modalities for their execution.

Given the wealth of knowledge represented in this distinguished group of experts in diverse but related disciplines of medicine, demography, agriculture and human nutrition, I am confident that the workshop will produce desired results. We at the ECA look forward to the outcome of this Workshop which will strengthen research methodologies and facilitate future work in the linkage between women's reproductive heath and household food security.

Dear Colleagues:

Let me conclude by expressing once again my gratitude and appreciation for honoring our invitation and for your support to the work of the ECA.

I wish you all fruitful deliberations and I now declare open the Workshop on "Women's Reproductive Health and Household Food Security in Africa".