PRESS BRIEFING BY UNITED NATIONS POPULATION FUND

Press Briefing

PRESS BRIEFING BY UNITED NATIONS POPULATION FUND

Mikko Kuustonen, the Finnish singer and songwriter, was introduced this morning by the Deputy Director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) at a briefing announcing his recent appointment as a UNFPA Goodwill Ambassador.

In explaining his interest in accepting the position, Mr. Kuustonen, who said he has travelled extensively throughout developing countries for the past 10 years, described an encounter with a young woman in Haiti. The pregnant nineteen-year-old woman was carrying her undernourished twin babies in her arms, with her three-year-old son trailing along beside her. Her five-year-old son had died, and her husband had left her. He noted that she must have been no more than fourteen years old when she had her first child. A health care and vaccination campaign had just started in her village. "But it came too late for her", he said. "As a teenager she had become an old woman. And her childrens' future is being buried under the struggle to survive." Describing his home country Finland as "the clinical paradise of health care, especially of infant and maternity care", he said it was so easy there to forget that 40 per cent of women in the world do not have access to maternity health care services and counselling. "No one person can change the whole world, but I know I can change the whole world of one person", Mr. Kuustonen said, adding that he accepted the ambassadorship with great joy and honour. His first undertaking as UNFPA Ambassador would be to produce a series of "face-to-face" interviews for Finnish television on the conditions of women in several developing countries. The purpose of airing the TV series in Finland was to increase public awareness and support for increasing funding, both domestically and internationally, for services that would allow women everywhere to exercise their basic human rights. "I am very interested in hope, its quality and its power", he said. While in songs, hope often sounded very romantic and idealistic, he had a different experience of hope from his travels. "In Asia, Africa and Latin America, I have seen some of those who have suffered the most, transformed by hope into passionate fighters for life." He wanted to see, learn and speak more about that hope. Alex Marshall, Deputy Director of UNFPA, in introducing Mr. Kuustonen, said that the UNFPA Goodwill Ambassadors were a partnership between the Fund and non-governmental organizations. Hilkka Vuorenmaa of the Family Federation of Finland, said her organization which worked in the field of sexual reproductive health care, would be working in close collaboration with Mr. Kuustonen and UNFPA. Her organization was doing advocacy work with decision makers, parliamentarians, media and teachers in Finland to encourage them to give more priority to population reproduction and sexual health care issues so that the Government would generate more funds in its development cooperation work to those issues. In response to a question as to how he had become a UNFPA ambassador, Mr. Kuustonen said that during his travels, it had become apparent to him, that in most of those places, the status of women was the key issue. "So it was easy to be excited when UNFPA contacted me."

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