Remarks by UNFPA Executive Director Dr. Natalia Kanem during the UNGA 2023 Side Event on Sustainable Financing for Family Planning

Excellencies, distinguished special guests and very dear friends.  We are most grateful for your presence.

Today,  UNFPA is very proud - we are proud to join together with the Global Financing Facility to outline a fresh, bold new vision to end the funding shortfall for lifesaving contraceptive supplies which is part of making rights and choices real for women and adolescent girls.

And who is the young woman at the heart of our dialogue today? Somewhere right now she is walking - she is walking miles in the hot sun to the health post, to the clinic and when she gets the question is: will it be open? Will the midwife, counsellor or nurse be there? Will the method that she has carefully chosen that is going to work for her be available in stock?

When that particular contraceptive that she wants is not there, that’s unacceptable. And that is the tremendous responsibility that countries' leaderships are facing today – to protect and expand access to sexual and reproductive health services even in the context of the many ongoing crises, the fall out from COVID, the climate disasters, the conflicts. Countries have to figure out health service provision when these budgets and infrastructure are stretched beyond capacity. And on top of that in planning and in the financing landscape that makes things difficult.

Last year alone, the world fell more than $100 million short when it came to financing what countries need to fulfil women’s demand for contraceptives. And without the acceleration of commitments, as we just heard, there is that danger that this gap could reach at least $1 billion by the year 2030.

There is no one sector that can do this on its own. That is why UNFPA and the Global Financing  Facility are partners - in SDG17 - in order to fill the gap, and to build country capacity, which is where the leadership resides and the potential for longer-term financial sustainability through domestic resources.

Right here, right now because of the pathbreaking, visionary leadership and the caring among the partners in this room, we have that opportunity to blaze a new path.  – and that’s a path where governments will lead, and it will also be the path of gradually increasing domestic ability to spend on family planning supplies. A clear pivot away from the traditional model of development funding turning now to one of development financing.

And the sustainable financing of contraceptives and other essential supplies represents power and independence and greater wellbeing for millions of daughters and mothers and sisters and adolescent girls who are still pleading for that type of empowerment that reproductive health autonomy provides.

So I hope we will hear more from you today about your ideas on how to do things like the UNFPA Supplies Match Fund of the UNFPA Supplies Partnership which has been a key lever towards this change.

And together whatever we do that is catalytic, that accelerates, that is not “business as usual”, that responds to the demands of women and of adolescent girls around the world we are there with you. It’s been proven over and over again that it is one of the  smartest investments that any country can make.

So thank you for joining us at this historic seventy-eighth session of the United Nations General Assembly. I really hope that our Secretary-General’s request that women be at the top of the agenda will be beyond symbolism, and we will back this with the investment required.