Philippine Statement of Commitment
during the Nairobi Summit on ICPD 25
on November 13, 2019
As delivered by Ernesto M. Pernia, PhD,
Secretary of Socioeconomic Planning
National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA), Philippines
The Philippines is one with the world in renewing with vigor our commitments to the International Conference on Population and Development Programme of Action and the Sustainable Development Goals Agenda.
Today, the Philippine economy is closer to achieving upper middle-income country status. There are fewer Filipinos living in poverty, fewer mothers dying while giving life, and more couples and individuals are able to achieve their desired number of children. Incidentally, the Philippines is number 1 in Asia in terms of the Global Gender Gap Index and 8th in the world. We are also seriously coming to grips with the issue of teenage pregnancies. Moreover, in the context of human capital investment, we now have a law that ensures early childhood development for the first 1000 days of life.
The ICPD principles have been our legal framework and our north star, in the pursuit of our population and family planning program objectives. This has been supported by the Responsible Parenthood and Reproductive Health Law, and further bolstered by the President’s Executive Order no. 12 on Zero Unmet Need for Modern Family Planning. We want to ensure that every pregnancy and every birth is wanted and that every Filipino is able to contribute productively to national development.
All our unified efforts to carry out the ICPD agenda are spelled out in our Philippine Development Plan 2017-2022. This is the first of four medium-term development plans geared towards our collective long-term vision by 2040 of a prosperous middle class society where no one is poor.
On migration, the Philippines thanks the General Assembly’s action in reaching broad agreement on the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM) so that our unfinished business is to call for safe and orderly migration, as well as reunification of families on return migration.
To end, let me cite our commitments to the ICPD Programme of Action:
- Fully implement our sexual and reproductive health and population-related policies;
- Accelerate integrated efforts to reach and optimize demographic dividend through scaling up of maternal and infant health programs in the first one thousand days of life of the child, and accelerate demographic transition through redoubled implementation of our population and family planning program;
- Increase investments and inter-agency cooperation for the promotion of the ICPD and SDGs agenda; and
- Reduce poverty rate to 14% by 2022, the end of this Administration, through the implementation of the 0-10 point Socioeconomic Agenda of President Rodrigo Roa Duterte.
Thank you for your kind attention.
Photos by: Commission on Population and Development (POPCOM) and UN Advisory Board Philippines