Bangladesh has made significant progress on its population goals but critical challenges on high rates of child marriage, adolescent pregnancy, and gender-based violence as well as stalled indicators on maternal mortality and reproductive health require a new big-push. PPRC and UNFPA have been in a strategic partnership to facilitate such a big-push on the 3 ZEROES AGENDA formulated as the re-set global population agenda at the International Conference on Population and Development held in Nairobi 2019 dubbed ICPD25. The 3 zeroes are - zero ‘unmet need’ for FP and SRH, zero preventable maternal mortality, and zero gender-based violence and harmful practices including child marriage. National and grassroots actors voiced the urgency for such a big push, particularly due to new setbacks during Covid, during the series of workshops, roundtables, and field consultations that PPRC and UNFPA had organized earlier in the year.
The new civic platform, bringing together national and grassroots organizations and actors working on these issues, was announced on Sunday, 11 December in a press conference jointly organized by PPRC and UNFPA. The new platform, titled 3Zeroes.ActionNetwork, will pursue a triple action agenda: i) promote greater cross-sectoral dialogues and community engagement ii) strengthen knowledge management and advocacy, and iii) track progress on the realization of the 3 zeroes agenda.
“We need a big-push, as well as an integrated push. If we want to reduce maternal mortality, we need to improve service delivery. If we want to reduce gender-based violence, we need to reduce child marriage as well” remarked Dr Hossain Zillur Rahman, Executive Chairman, PPRC. “We aim to generate a 3Zeroes tracker, to capture all kinds of data, including generating primary data of our own. By 2030, we should achieve significant progress on these goals.”
Ms. Kristine Blokhus, Country Representative, UNFPA, expressed UNFPA’s excitement about the initiative and shared that this cooperation will help build the kind of national movement required to eliminate child marriage, prevent gender-based violence, and reduce maternal mortality and will re-energize stakeholders to develop more specific and concrete solutions to fully realize the 3 Zeroes in Bangladesh.
The platform will be structured around a national convening committee, thematic advisory groups, grass-root focal points, and a secretariat. It will be open to the membership of individuals and institutions. Both the structure and operational modalities will be finalized through a consultative process.
Professor Md. Mainul Islam of the Department of Population Sciences, University of Dhaka, and Mohammad Abdul Wazed, Senior Fellow, PPRC were present during the press conference.
The official soft launch of the platform took place at Hotel Sarina on the same date. A number of key stakeholders including representatives of civil society organizations, NGOs and INGOs, academicians, development partners, UN organizations and government officials were present at the event and shared their expressions of solidarity.
