Our Mission

UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund, is an international development agency that promotes the right of every woman, man and child to enjoy a life of health and equal opportunity. UNFPA supports countries in using population data for policies and programmes to reduce poverty and to ensure that every pregnancy is wanted, every birth is safe, every young person is free of HIV/AIDS, and every girl and woman is treated with dignity and respect.

UNFPA – because everyone counts.

Meeting Development Goals

UNFPA seeks to improve the lives and expand the choices of individuals and couples. Over time, the reproductive choices they make, multiplied across communities and countries, alter population structures and trends.

UNFPA helps governments, at their request, to formulate policies and strategies to reduce poverty and support sustainable development. The Fund also assists countries to collect and analyse population data that can help them understand population trends. And it encourages governments to take into account the needs of future generations, as well as those alive today.

The close links between development and reproductive health and gender equality, the other main areas of UNFPA's work, were affirmed at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo. UNFPA is guided in its work by the Programme of Action adopted there. At the conference, 179 countries agreed that meeting needs for education and health, including reproductive health, is a prerequisite for sustainable development over the longer term. They also agreed on a roadmap for progress with the following goals:

Reaching the goals of the Programme of Action is also essential for achieving the Millennium Development Goals. These eight goals, which are fully aligned with the ICPD roadmap, have the overarching aim of reducing extreme poverty by half by 2015. UNFPA brings its special expertise in reproductive health and population issues to the worldwide collaborative effort of meeting the Millennium Development Goals.

Improving Reproductive Health

Reproductive health is a means to sustainable development as well as a human right. Some 350 million couples lack the ability to plan their families or space their children. Investments in reproductive health save and improve lives, slow the spread of HIV and encourage gender equality. These benefits, in turn, help to stabilize population growth and reduce poverty. The benefits extend from the individual to the family and from the family to the world.

UNFPA promotes a holistic approach to reproductive health care that includes:

Making Motherhood Safer

Every minute, a woman in the developing world dies from treatable complications of pregnancy or childbirth. Every minute, a family is devastated. The lives of surviving children are put at risk. Communities suffer. And for every woman who dies, as many as 20 others are seriously harmed by fistula or other injuries of childbearing.

UNFPA's strategy for preventing maternal mortality includes:

UNFPA also advocates at many levels for the right of mothers to give birth safely. It spearheads the global Campaign to End Fistula , a collaborative initiative to prevent this devastating injury of childbirth and to restore the health and dignity of those who have been living with its consequences.

Supporting Adolescents and Youth

Half of the world – some 3 billion people -- are under the age of 25. Addressing the critical challenges facing the largest youth generation in history is an urgent priority if social and economic development efforts are to succeed and the AIDS pandemic is to be reversed.

UNFPA invests in programmes to meet young people's needs for health care, education, economic opportunity and life skills. The Fund works to ensure that adolescents and young people receive accurate information, non-judgmental counselling and comprehensive and affordable services to prevent unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections, including HIV. In this work, UNFPA seeks to engage young people as active participants in programmes that affect them.

Preventing HIV/AIDS

In 2004, more than 3 million people died from AIDS, and 5 million were newly infected. Each day 14,000 people—half of them aged 15 to 24—acquire the infection. Women are increasingly at risk.

Prevention, the centrepiece of UNFPA's fight against the disease, is being integrated into reproductive health programming around the world. Key priorities are promoting safer sexual behaviour -- including delayed sexual initiation -- among young people, making sure condoms are readily available and widely and correctly used, and preventing the infection among pregnant women and their children.

Promoting Gender Equality

Women can and must play a powerful role in sustainable development and poverty eradication. When women are educated and healthy, their families, communities and countries benefit. Yet gender-based discrimination and violence pervade almost every aspect of life, undermining the opportunities of women and denying them the ability to fully exercise their basic human rights.

Gender equality is a human right and one of the eight Millennium Development Goals. Investments in gender equality can improve the lives of both men and women, with lasting benefits for the next generations. For more than 30 years, UNFPA has been in the forefront of bringing gender issues to wider attention, promoting legal and policy reforms and gender-sensitive data collection, and supporting projects that empower women economically.

Using Culturally Sensitive Approaches

UNFPA's activities touch on the most sensitive and intimate spheres of human existence, including reproductive health and rights, gender relations and population issues. Attitudes about these subjects vary widely between and among different cultures.

Changing deeply rooted attitudes, behaviours and laws—especially those dealing with gender relations and reproductive health—can be a long process that requires a culturally sensitive approach. The Fund respects cultural diversity. At the same time, it rejects those practices that endanger women and girls. It works closely and respectfully with communities to enlist their support in upholding the human rights of all its members.


Protecting Human Rights

All individuals are entitled to equal rights and protections. This idea is fundamental to UNFPA's mission and to its way of working.

A strong emphasis on the rights of individual women and men underpins the 1994 Cairo Consensus that guides UNFPA's work. This emphasis on human rights at the ICPD marked a shift in population policy and programmes away from a focus on human numbers and placed human lives front and centre. At that meeting, delegates from all regions and cultures agreed that reproductive health is a basic human right and that individuals have the right to choose the number, timing and spacing of their children.

Human rights affirmed in international agreements have important implications for reproductive health care, gender equality and population and development strategies.

Securing Reproductive Health Supplies

Without essential commodities—from contraceptives to testing kits to equipment for emergency obstetric care—people cannot fully exercise the right to reproductive health. In many places, condoms are urgently needed to prevent the further spread of HIV. UNFPA's mandate in this area is to provide the right quantities of the right products in the right condition in the right place at the right time for the right price. This complex logistical process involves many actors from both the public and private sectors. UNFPA takes a lead role in reproductive health commodity security, by forecasting needs, mobilizing support, building logistical capacity at the country level and coordinating the whole process.


Assisting in Emergencies

Humanitarian crises are reproductive health disasters. In the wake of war or natural disaster, educational and health systems collapse, gender-based violence increases, HIV and other sexually transmitted infections spread, and infant and maternal mortality rates often skyrocket. The collapse of social systems leaves women and young people especially vulnerable.

Within the coordinated, inter-agency response to disasters, UNFPA takes the lead in providing supplies and services to protect reproductive health. Priority areas include safe motherhood; prevention of sexually transmitted infections, including HIV; adolescent health; and gender-based violence. UNFPA also encourages the full participation of women and young people in efforts to rebuild their societies.


Building Support

As the world's leading multilateral agency on population, UNFPA is the most prominent international advocate for reproductive health and rights, including the right to choose the number and spacing of one's children.

Working in partnership with other United Nations agencies, governments, communities, NGOs, foundations and the private sector, the Fund raises awareness and mobilizes the support and resources needed to reach the targets set forth at the International Conference on Population and Development and in the Millennium Development Goals. In 2004, UNFPA received a record high in voluntary contributions for its core resources from 166 countries, also a record number.


UNFPA's Global Reach

UNFPA supports programmes in four regions: the Arab States and Europe, Asia and the Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean, and sub-Saharan Africa. We work in 126 countries, areas and territories through nine Country Technical Services Teams and 112 country offices. Three-quarters of UNFPA staff work in the field.

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