Bangladesh has started a process to set up a ‘parliamentary caucus’ to better coordinate parliament’s actions on reproductive, maternal and child health, Foreign Minister Dipu Moni has said.
Speaking at the end of the Inter-Parliamentary Union’s (IPU) two-day meet in Dhaka, Dipu Moni on Wednesday said Speaker would be in the helm of the Caucus.
She said the Caucus would work “to enhance budgetary provision in national budget and to enhance accountability and partnership for promoting women and child friendly health facilities in remote areas”.
The two-day meet of parliamentarians from nine countries with high maternal and child mortality rate discussed ways to improve health of mothers and children and to make parliament more ‘accountable for it’.
They reiterated parliamentarians “proactive roles in ensuring adequate resource mobilisation for women and children’s health” and urged executive arms of the governments “to extend the fiscal space available to parliaments” for women and child health.
The foreign minister said it was ‘imperative’ that parliamentarians were provided with “updated and evidence based information as inputs for policy formulations and legislative deliberations”.
She urged developing countries with ‘comparable’ health outcomes to join hands for forging ‘a global compact’ for mobilising “enhanced, predictable and sustainable” resources through meaningful international cooperation.
She said global health assumed ‘important place’ in Bangladesh’s foreign policy agenda. “We shall continue to pursue critical challenges that have been discussed here as part of our broader policy”.
“This we believe would be crucial for putting accountability framework at the heart of our global discourse of maternal and child health”.
Over the past decade, the international communities have joined hands in a global effort to accelerate progress in improving women and children’s health.
Reports indicate that these global initiatives have generated ‘tangible progress worldwide, but there is still more to be done’.
The WHO says millions of women and children die ‘prematurely’ across Africa, Asia and Latin America, the regions from where parliamentarians attended the meeting.
The parliamentarians last year at the IPU’s 126th Assembly, in a resolution, committed to improve the well-being of women and children.
In the Dhaka meeting, they shared processes and methods ‘to promote parliament’s accountability’ in ensuring a healthy future for women and children.
Source: Bd news24
