A number of African gender advocates in both government and civil society have put up spirited fight to have the United Nations create a Fund to address millennium development goal issues of reproductive health.

Funds for environment purposes will be used to help countries carry out things such as Impact Assessment Studies before they allow certain investments to go on.

At the moment, the proponents of the Fund argue that these issues are not receiving substantial funding as those on HIV/Aids, and Poverty reduction strategies.

Likewise, these are the goals still registering massive negative results five years after the MDGs were initiated.

“It looks like we are not getting our priorities right. Although other Funds are important, the one to save lives is more important,” says Dr Richard Muga, the Director of National Council for Population and Development.

He adds that no country can develop without ensuring the health, survival and freedom of its women to exploit their potential.

But the United States, especially the Bush Administration and other pro-life advocates, are said not to be warming up to the idea, which they see as coded attempts to fund abortion related issues and increase procurement of condoms.

Indeed, the administration has in the recent past refused to fund projects or programmes that it believes advocate for reproductive rights of women or distribution of condoms.

The administration hold that women have to carry their pregnancies to term, while at the same time, the youths or partners, have to abstain from sex.

The proposed Fund will operate like the Global Fund for HIV/Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, currently advancing huge sums of money to countries to combat these diseases.

During the just concluded UN Summit on MDGs, a number of African gender activists tried to impress on and lobby other members on the need to come up with a UN resolution on the establishment of such a Fund.

Their argument is that progressive gender empowerment provisions in the Beijing Platform of Action, the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development, and the Convention on the Elimination of All forms of Discriscrimination Against Women, have not been realised because of lack of resources.

“International and national government budgets have notoriously continued to provide insufficient or nothing at all towards women issues,” says Mary Aluoch, a member of the civil society who attended the UN meeting.

During the Beijing +10 review conference early this year in New York, Miriam Matembe, a Minister from Uganda, said the next campaign for women was to find ways of how to leverage resources to improve their wellbeing.

“We have generated a lot of research, strategies and policies on how to improve women lives, but nothing has happened so far. This time around we want action,” she said.

The Fund is therefore expected to fill the gap of resource deficient, and accelerate achievement of programmes and objectives on gender issues.

The concerns of African gender advocates proposing the establishment of the Fund, especially the women, is that despite high maternal and child mortality rates in sub-Saharan Africa, very little funding is extended to programmes such as family planning and safe motherhood.

Speaking at the UN summit, a government delegate from Malawi said the Democracy Fund created by the UN should have been preceded by a Fund to address issues of maternal and child mortality.

And this, he says, is strongly supported by the existing scenarios in many African countries.

According to World Health Organisation, sub-Saharan Africa accounts for about 529,000 maternal deaths that occur worldwide, with maternal mortality ratio standing at 920 in every 100,000 women, compared to only 20 in developed countries. In Kenya, the ratio is over 400, while in Uganda and Tanzania is over 500.

The organisation's Skilled Attendant at Birth 2005 Estimates report, says only 46.2 percent of women who deliver in Africa and 41 percent in Kenya, do so with the assistance of skilled birth attendants, a key factor responsible for high maternal mortality rates. In Uganda, the figure stands at 39 percent.

Similar sickening statistics are replayed when one looks at the issue of child mortality in the same region. The rate of children who die before the age of five years is estimated at over 80 in 1,000 live births, the highest in the world. Kenya's rate stands at 113.

Consequently, the funds from an MDG Fund, argue gender advocates, should be used to train more skilled attendants, improve health referral systems, and other health infrastructure critical to reducing maternal and child mortality.

Women vying for political positions and girls and women pursuing higher education can too apply to the Fund for funding.

The Fund's proceeds should further be extended to increased immunization and provision of micro-nutrients to children.

On maternal mortality, funding for contraceptives as an intervention to safe motherhood, remains the lowest in many African countries.

In Kenya, for instance, while the department for reproductive health needs about Ksh 2 billion annually to implement its contraceptive programme, only half of it is available, with a huge fraction of this coming from donors.

Now, as the tempo for creation of the Fund takes centre stage in other major forums, its proponents say they are even ready to insert provisions that will prohibit the funds from the MDG Fund being used for abortion related cases.

“If we can just save lives, then we are ready to do everything to achieve this,” says Christina Lutemba, a civil society representative from Uganda.

But the same people are torn between on how to effect such a caveat when they are faced with women seeking post-abortion care.