The sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) agenda was affirmed in the Programme of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) held in Cairo in 1994. The agenda included, promoting gender equality, empowerment of women, equal access to education for girls and the provision of universal access to family planning and sexual and reproductive health services and reproductive rights. Twenty years from the ICPD agenda, at the 13th session of the Open Working Group on the Sustainable Development Goals, ensuring universal access to sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights was included as a sub-goal within Goal 5 on achieving gender equality and empowerment of all women and girls of the outcome document. Goal 3 of the document also includes ensuring universal access to sexual and reproductive health care services, including for family planning, information and education, and the integration of reproductive health into national strategies and programmes by 2030.
SRHR are intimately interlinked to other development agendas including the achievement of gender equality, human rights, elimination of poverty and inequality. Working on SRHR requires working at the intersections of several issues such as that of migration, health, climate change, population dynamics, conflicts and disasters, food and nutrition security, and access to resources. Challenges faced by women in realizing their SRHR should therefore be viewed in the context of these variables, so that appropriate and sustainable interventions can take place. Although the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) highlight the importance of some of the SRHR agenda, they have also been criticized for the narrow interventions which often fail to consider the underlying social determinants and power dimensions of gender, poverty, inequality, inequity, ill-health and mortality. Twenty years since the ICPD agenda and the MDG framework, it is significant to assess progress towards SRHR in the Asia-Pacific region.