DPRK Ensures Health and Rights of Women and Girls.

July 11 is World Population Day.

In November last year, a meeting on the population and development was held in Nairobi, Kenya. Many agreements were made at the meeting, including the specific plans for reducing the possibly preventive mortality rate of pregnant women and nursing mothers in all countries, fully meeting the demands of women for family planning and putting an end to gender-based violence and harmful acts on women, and the action directions for the countries.

But the worldwide COVID-19 laid serious obstacles to the work for ensuring women’s reproductive health and their rights.

In this context, the United Nations Population Fund set the theme of World Population Day as “Putting the Breaks on COVID-19: How to Safeguard the Health and Rights of Women and Girls Now?” On this occasion, the UNPF called on all countries across the world to raise awareness about the sexual and reproductive health needs and vulnerabilities of women and girls during the pandemic and make more efforts to achieve the sustainable development goals by 2030.

The DPRK is taking positive measures to prevent COVID-19 and protect and improve the people’s health and thus fully ensures women and girls’ health and rights.

According to the State measures, a non-permanent central public health committee was organized and emergency anti-epidemic headquarters were established in all provinces, cities and counties to prevent the inflow of COVID-19 through border areas.

The State took measures to temporarily stop the operation of nursing institutions and grant holidays and temporary subsidies to the guardians of children under 5.

Wide publicity to hygienic information has been given through the mass media to encourage all the people to participate in sterilization voluntarily and compulsorily. Various medical services are in full swing, including video conference, treatment and consultation through the telemedicine system.

All the medical service and preventive work such as the registration of pregnant women and nursing mothers, over six rounds of consultation and treatment and preventive vaccination are being conducted in a planned way.

The Population Centre of the DPRK published a special issue “Population Newsletter” on this occasion.