**Punjab to propose sex education in curriculum
** PWD member highlights department’s efforts to achieve MDGs*
LAHORE: **The Punjab government will ask the federal government to include sex education in the curriculum to raise awareness about problems due to increasing population and improve reproductive health.
**Punjab Population Welfare Department (PWD) **member Kazi Afaque Hussain said this while chairing “Provincial consultation on expanding the millennium development goals (MDG) agenda” at a local hotel on Wednesday.
Marie Stopes Society and Shirkat Gah, two non-government organisations (NGOs), arranged the consultation in collaboration with other civil societies. Dr Yasmeen Sabeeh Qazi conducted the consultation.
Hussain said that a provincial coordination committee on population welfare had considered the proposal. Secretaries of education and religious affairs, finance, local government and rural development departments constituted the committee. He said that they planned to reach consensus on all issues.
Later, the PWD secretary told Daily Times that **the committee would meet to finalise the stage (primary, secondary or intermediate) in which sex-education should be introduced. **He said the federal government had the power to revise, change and implement the curriculum.
Hussain said that the government and his department were trying to achieve MDGs and the eight development goals should be achieved by 2015. He highlighted his department’s role in poverty and hunger eradication; universal primary education; gender equality and empowering women; reducing child mortality; improving maternal health; combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; ensuring environmental sustainability; and global development.
In September 2000, heads of 189 states adopted the UN Millennium Declaration, which set the goals that had to be achieved by 2015. The eight MDGs were built on agreements made at UN conferences in the 1990s. Under the MDGs, the developed countries would help the under-developed countries through trade, development assistance, debt relief, access to essential medicines and technology transfer.
The consultation’s aim was to activate civil societies to work on the MDGs and to demonstrate that little progress was possible unless reproductive health and human rights were promoted. This is a series of consultation to achieve MDGs. Recommendations by these consultations would be given to the federal and provincial MDGs committees and to the Global MDG Summit in September.
Insha Hamdani, Khawar Mumtaz, Dr Qazi, Abdullah Khan Sumbal, Dr Narjis Rizvi, Dr Samra Arif, Fatima Haider, Muneeza Hashmi, Simi H Raheel, Ayyaz Kiani and Dr Rubina Sohail addressed the issue of achieving MDGs through social development, the media, consumer, health, education and youth.