Julia Terborg (Suriname) is a longstanding member of the Latin American and Caribbean Women’s Health Network, a sociologist and SRHR activist in particular in the area of monitoring the ICPD PoA. She was a member of the Suriname delegation at CPD49.

Before I look at challenges and advances related to the implementation of the Montevideo Consensus, I think it is good to reflect first our experiences in the past 20 years as civil society on the monitoring of the Program of Action (PoA) of ICPD and how this impacted on our current country position. Based on these experiences I will shed light on challenges and advances with respect to Montevideo Consensus.

Suriname experiences

In Suriname, the monitoring of the implementation of the PoA of ICPD started in 1998, when civil society in Suriname joined forces with the Latin American and Caribbean Women’s Health Network (LACWHN) to develop a collective instrument and database, named Athenea, for the monitoring of ICPD., which Dutch speaking Suriname was the only Caribbean country in this regional team, which was further composed of 6 Latin American countries: Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Nicaragua, Colombia and Bolivia. For Suriname’s active participation, we had to overcome long distance and language barriers, but based on our common commitment to this project we were very successful in reaching our objectives. In Suriname this regional project resulted in a comprehensive NGO country report for ICPD+10, in which the period 1994-2004 was reviewed. Even when the regional monitoring project was finalized we continued with a second civil society review of ICPD+15 and were also closely involved in the global review and country report on ICPD+20.

The close collaboration with the women’s health movement in the region, and the production of country reports were strong instruments in educating and raising awareness among both government and the general public on the comprehensive issue of sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), and strengthening linkages with other activists working in the areas of gender equality and human rights and monitoring other agreements, in particular CEDAW, Being, Belem do Parra and Convention on Rights of Children (CRC).

Developing detailed knowledge and expertise on SRHR, provision of detailed data, based on statistics but also on qualitative studies, positioned us as SRHR experts, who were recognized by the government and involved in the development of national policy on sexual and reproductive health and rights.

This involvement in policy and follow up actions, combines with active advocacy, had created opportunities for civil society to be included in national delegations to the high level UN and other intergovernmental regional meetings, in particular to Commission on Population and Development (CPD) and Commission on Status of Women (CSW).
We are happy to see that our investment in monitoring ICPD in the past 20 years significantly contributed to the consistent progressive position of the Suriname government in reaffirming not only the PoA of ICPD but also to be in full support of Montevideo Consensus, the most advanced SRHR agenda in the world.

Challenges

Taking along our rich experiences with the monitoring of the PoA of ICPD we will continue with the monitoring of SRHR agenda with regional specificity, and at the same time integrated with a larger 2030 agenda. The monitoring of the implementation of the Montevideo Consensus poses some challenges that we are familiar with and some challenges that are relatively new and which will need our special attention.

Some of the old challenges are mainly related to structural gaps in government. All over the Caribbean, governments are constantly faced with increasing economic challenges and liable to shocks due to lack of diversity in the economy. The weakness in the government institutions is also reflected in a weak, fragmented and slow response to population issues, including SRHR, and challenges in the monitoring of PoA of ICPD:

Barriers with respect to data collection, analysis and the translation of such analysis into policies and programs.

Lack of human resources and research capacity.

Lack of national structures and mechanisms for effective monitoring

The Montevideo Consensus poses new challenges due to its advanced agenda but also because our region is going through important political and economic changes.

The challenges I would like to highlight are:

Conservative forces are on the move disseminating misinformation on concepts as sexual rights and deliberately creating and propagating distorted views on the language used in the Montevideo Consensus.

We are increasingly faced with many emerging issues in the area of SRHR that were not included in our earlier monitoring e.g. sexual trafficking, sex work in the goldmines, new and less visible forms of sexual exploitation of women and girls through internet, social media and modern cell phone and video technology, intimate partner violence and femicide.

Decreased access to financial and technical support from our traditional partners, in particular UN agencies UNFPA, UNWOMEN and UNICEF. A critical reason for this is that the Caribbean region has been categorized as middle income. Many UN offices have been downsized or fully closed and this has had significant consequences and repercussions for our work.

Weakening of the feminist health movement in the Caribbean region. There are indications that the women’s and feminist movement as a whole, and in the health sphere in particular, lost some of its previous its strength, which can also be attributed to decreasing funds for CSO and retiring of the previous vanguard.

My expectations are that there are still a lot of actions that need to be taken before the required conditions are in place for using the Operational Guide as a working document in monitoring the Montevideo Consensus. On the other hand I’m very positive and convinced that this Montevideo Consensus will eventually lead to transformative changes with regard to the promotion, protection and fulfillment of sexual and reproductive rights in our region.

Way forward

I wish to emphasis and state categorically that CSOs played a major role in, and will continue to do so in the monitoring of the implementation of Montevideo. Despite our set backs, we still have an experienced existing network of women and feminist organizations and individual experts across Latin America and the Caribbean, that has a great history of collaboration. The main challenge will be to find effective strategies to keep CSOs closely involved and actively participating in the design of the final monitoring instrument, in particular in defining the specific indicators for measuring the implementation of the paragraphs related to SRHR, gender equality and women’s empowerment, and to guarantee that Montevideo feeds into the 2030 agenda, both at the regional and at the national level. Furthermore, of course, CSOs have a critical role in raising awareness on the close interconnection between SRHR and the right to development, especially among high level political authorities, who tend to keep SRHR in the private/domestic spheres and are reluctant to acknowledge SRHR as public issues, which are critical for national development.

The feminist- and SRHR networks at the regional level, including experienced and widely recognized organizations such as the ‘Articulation of Civil Society Organizations from Latin America and the Caribbean’, the ‘Latin American and Caribbean Women’s Health Network’ (LACWHN) and ‘International Planned Parenthood Federation’ (IPPF), Western Hemisphere Region’ already took important initiatives to ensure effective monitoring of Montevideo and will continue to lead and strengthening civil society at all levels including at the national level in their monitoring and advocacy efforts.

The time is now, as the governments are in the middle of follow up discussions on the methods of work and determining of indicators. It is crucial that, in accordance with the Operational guide of Montevideo, which speaks explicitly on the participation of civil society in the monitoring, that CSOs remain alert to ensure that appropriate structures and mechanisms for transparency and accountability are in place to facilitate implementation. ~