Eighth Country Regional workshop on RHCS begins on April 25

Lanka is the venue for a eighth country regional workshop on Reproductive Health Commodity Security (RHCS). The objective of the program is to strengthen capacity of participating countries on RHCS programming.

The workshop will give an opportunity for countries to share their experiences on RHCS with sessions following specific determinants: enabling environment utilization, demand, access, supply, procurement, coordination, supervision, funding, capacity building and monitoring and Evaluation (M&E). Participating countries include Sri Lanka, Maldives, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Afghanistan and Iran.

Access to knowledge on how to plan a family is vital for the peace and well-being of any community. The current thinking on reproductive health set in place a ground breaking agenda, to which Sri Lanka is co-signatory that recognised a broad based definition of reproductive health.

This definition recognized that reproductive health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity in all matters relating to the reproductive system and its functions and processes.

At this conference the global community agreed that "reproductive health" implies that people are able to have a satisfying and safe sex life, the capability to reproduce and the freedom to decide if, when and how often to do so.

Implicit in this condition are the rights of men and women to be informed and to have access to safe, effective, affordable and acceptable methods of family planing of their choice, as well as other methods of their choice for the regulation of fertility which are not against the law, and the right of access to appropriate health care-services that will enable women to go safely through pregnancy and child birth, and provide couples with the best chance of having healthy infant" (ICPD-Plan of Action).

Consequently providing a country's various community groups with access to reproductive services and the contraceptives they require, is a must.

In the first instance, the selection and procurement of various forms of contraceptives present a major challenge to concerned authorities. The following steps, inclusive of storage, distribution, promotion amongst users and guidance to them is fraught with even greater challenges. These matters will be discussed by these eight countries.

The UNFPA resource persons will share the lessons learned through the global experience to share and enable the national authorities of these countries to select their own approaches to these issues to best suit their contexts.

The workshop organized by UNFPA Country Support Team (CST) is hosted by the Ministry of Health (MoH) Sri Lanka and the UNFPA country office, sri Lanka. Nimal Siripala de Silva, Minister of Healthcare and nutrition will grace this occasion.