First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign and European Affairs Vesna Pusić is participating in the international conference in Dubrovnik titled “The Future of Development Aid in Europe: Transforming the lives of girls and women through public-private partnership”, organized by the Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs and attended by numerous international guests.
In her keynote address, Pusić said that the conference would focus on development aid directed towards women and girls. “By making women the principal recipients and partners of development aid, one is assisting in the most effective way the reconstruction of society as well as care for children and the elderly – tasks performed by women in the developed societies as well. Defining women as partners in development aid, and this is coming from a woman who has a lot of experience in this, is both smart and beneficial,” Pusić said.
The discussion will also focus on the reproductive health of women and girls as well as on the two most important aspects of life – education and health. Reproductive health, said Pusić, is a social problem and the lack of knowledge and care in that regard is not women’s fault but society’s. It kills women and newborns, destroying the society and its capacity for post-conflict recovery.
Also discussed will be the prospects of synergizing state and institutional donors with private foundations in order to maximise development aid results. The focus is on post-conflict societies, which Croatia has experience in.
Pusić cited UN researches, which state that in post-conflict economies, women invest 90% of their salaries back into families, as opposed to 40% in case of men. That, Pusić said, shows the importance of identifying women as development partners.
“Annually, girls bring 39 million babies into the world. That in itself underlines the importance of the issues we will discuss today,” the minister said, adding that reproductive health as well as the right of when, with whom and how many children one wanted to have had become a ‘big deal’ lately. She underscored the problem of older men and women deciding on the reproductive rights of young women, which our own society is not immune to either. “It is not just a matter of reproductive rights, but of power. Throughout history, every society tried to control population by controlling women and their rights – in the name of religion, politics, good manners, power, but the result has always been the same. Somebody else controlled their rights, not women themselves,” Pusić said. She expressed concern that such attitudes existed in the countries providing development aid as well, including the rich and developed ones, as that such values were then being passed on through cooperation. “I would like to tackle this issue during the conference,” she said, adding it was important to discuss sensitive and controversial issues, not only in developing societies but in our own as well.