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Universal access to sexual and reproductive health services is a human rights imperative

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Different countries have different problems. In countries like Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Malaysia, one of the key issues now is of migrant workers. Many of these migrant workers are not registered or documented. Hence they may not have full access to healthcare in terms of universal health care policies or insurances that are available for the citizens of that country. Sometimes high cost of health services and/or language can be a barrier. Working with migrant workers on SRHR is an emerging issue that still needs to be tackled here.

In the Pacific Islands, the sheer difficulty of reaching people living in far away and hard to reach islands, makes accessibility to sexual and reproductive health services a difficult task. There is lack of human resources too.

What is the way forward?

Tomoko Fukuda: A lot of the problems that plague the region relate to the diverse cultures, social norms and age-old traditions. The key point is for women to come together, form community based groups, local groups and also to make a coalition at the national level and ensure that women's voices are raised and are delivered to the governments. We also need to work more with women's gender rights groups and feminist groups and not only with the health sector.

All discussions around population and development should focus on women and sexual and reproductive health and rights. We have to work more with our politicians and parliamentarians and ensure that they approach these issues in a rights based manner.

All of this requires a multi-stakeholder approach. International organizations, local/regional NGOs and media-all stakeholders should come together to create a mechanism for monitoring progress and a platform where we can raise our voices collectively to push governments towards contributing to this. This must go hand in hand with our push for universal health coverage.

What is your message for International Women's Day (#IWD2020)?

Tomoko Fukuda: I really like the theme for this year's International Women's Day:"An equal world is an enabled world." It says a lot about empowering women to be able to have correct information and take action on whatever choices they make. If a woman is not enabled to make choices about her own body how can she be able to become equal in this world? It is no easy task to make women to be able to make choices and be able to be equal in an unequal world. We cannot put all the women in one basket. They come from different cultures, different social norms and different family situations and enabling them is not as easy as just one word. We need to be sensitively aware of the difficulties that prevent women from making and exercising their choices, so that interventions can be tailored appropriately according to their needs.

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