On June 3, RH Reality Check and Americans for UNFPA hosted an online forum on global women's health in the American political agenda. During the forum I had the opportunity to highlight the fact that in Latin America USAID's priorities and targets have radically shifted in the last years.

As I wrote, in the nineties, USAID's reproductive rights funded programs in the region were so large and aggressive that they sometimes even led to abuses in which a woman's right to reproductive autonomy was systematically ignored in the name of prevention of unintended pregnancies.

A decade later, with a different party ruling in Washington, family planning programs and NGOs working on these issues saw their USAID funding severely cut, forcing government policies to reorient their aims and NGOs to rethink their projects and activities if they were willing to continue receiving USAID financial aid. This has of course severely affected most long term projects focusing on women's reproductive rights that started in the nineties, and has ultimately affected overall women's rights in the region.

Unfortunately, overall funding for civil society organizations working on women's rights issues and gender equality appears to have been going down worldwide as a result of the new aid environment and its consequences on the relations with the donors. Precisely due to the growing concern on this theme, the UK Gender and Development Network launched a report early this year on the new aid environment and its implications on civil society organizations' work.

The report points out that the Beijing Women's Conference encouraged donors to increase their support to civil society organizations working on gender; however, changes in the aid structures started in the late nineties, when donors grew frustrated with lack of results, leading to "a feeling that projects run by donors and civil society organizations lacked the coverage, capacity and coordination to make any significant difference."

Donor attention shifted focused to poverty issues, especially in Africa, both because of the UN Millennium Development Goals and because the Official Development Assistance in accordance to the World Bank and OECD parameters is guided by macroeconomic indicators that do not necessarily show inequalities within societies in middle income countries. As a result, funding has been re-directed "away from ‘middle-income' countries in Central and South America where (...) many poor women -- and indeed all women in areas of sexual and reproductive health -- are prevented from accessing their rights."

The report also emphasizes the fact that sexual and reproductive health rights are declining in some Latin American countries due to the loss of funding. These new aid environment principles were finally endorsed by the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness in 2005 and "marked major changes in the focus of aid -- away from funding civil society and donor projects back to funding the state and away from funding a wide range of countries to a focus on low income countries -- and the mechanisms of aid."

In Colombia in June, Latin American and Caribbean women's organizations gathered to discuss the effects of the new aid environment in the region, hoping to raise their concerns at the Third High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Accra, Ghana, in September. The women's groups agreed that the feminization of poverty, the eradication of gender violence and the defense of sexual and reproductive rights are the core of their agenda, although the resources they have for this purposes diminish every day. They concluded that for the Accra debate to be inclusive and participatory when reviewing aid effectiveness, it is necessary to acknowledge the peculiarities of the Latin American context as mentioned.

This already delicate situation is exacerbated when the US -- usually a major donor in developing countries -- cuts its funding due to questionable reasons. RH Reality Check has already reported on Bush's denial to fund UNFPA for seven years in a row now, counting a total amount of US $235 million so far! The fact that he bases his decisions on groundless reasons is not new either. However, it makes me wonder how long this situation will last, especially taking into account that there will be a changing of the guard in Washington by the end of the year and neither of the two parties involved has actually expressed real concern about reproductive rights or women's health issues. This situation is severely exacerbated by the fact that UNFPA has been particularly proactive in the region by providing technical assistance to NGO's as well as to government officials, and is an important donor itself for numerous civil society organizations working on sexual and reproductive health issues that struggle among themselves to access to sometimes meaningless funds.