'2015 Will Not Come Too Soon'.

Consider for a moment:

* In the time it takes you to read this article, 30 adolescents will contract HIV/AIDS.

* Over the next 24 hours, the equivalent of four jumbo jets full of women will die from pregnancy-related causes, 99 per cent of them in low-income countries.

* Over the next week, 38,460 girls will be subjected to female genital mutilation.

The statistics are staggering. But for those of us who sometimes want to throw up our arms in despair and wish these global reproductive health problems would simply go away, there is a lot to be hopeful about today.

Since February, Governments and activists from around the world have been gathering to assess what has happened in the five years since the historic United Nations International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994. Throughout this process, known as ICPD+5, they have found some heartening success stories. And while some significant obstacles remain, they are recommitting themselves to further action.

It was in Cairo that nations from around the world agreed that population is about people, about empowering women in the economic, social and political spheres, and about meeting individual's reproductive health needs within the framework of human rights. In a historic consensus led by the United States, 179 countries determined that improving women's reproductive health and increasing their status in society are essential ingredients to a country's sustainability and growth.

If this seems like common sense, consider that experts used to believe that population was simply a numbers game that could be remedied by providing people with inexpensive contraceptives. Unfortunately, this misguided belief at times led to coercive programmes that violated human rights in a number of nations. The Indian Government, for example, in the 1970s undertook a programme to reduce its population through forced sterilizations. That programme backfired; men and women across India lost faith in family planning methods for years afterwards.

How is the world doing five years after the Cairo Conference? Some signs are encouraging. Of the 28 African countries where female genital mutilation is prevalent, 7 have outlawed the practice over the past five years. Seven countries across the world have acted to make abortion safer by easing legal restrictions on the procedure.

In the United States, the rate of unintended teen pregnancies has fallen. Significantly, discussing the specifics of reproductive and sexual health, even in the chambers of some of the world's most conservative governments, is no longer considered taboo.

What then is the leading factor preventing nations from achieving their reproductive health goals? In a word: money. In Cairo, it was estimated that it would take $17 billion in the year 2000 to achieve basic reproductive health care and related social-sector initiatives. In the interest of self-reliance, two thirds of that money was to come from low- and middle-income countries themselves. To date, these countries are 68 per cent of the way towards their commitment. Considering that we are only a few months shy of the new millennium, this does not exactly bode well for women around the world.

But even more troublesome, the donor countries, who pledged to contribute one third of the total cost, or $5.7 billion, are just barely one third of the way there. If each of us in the world's wealthiest countries were to forgo spending money on one fast-food meal a year, we could make up for this gap in funding, according to Population Action International, a Washington, D.C.-based group. In short, the failure of donor countries is due to lack of political will, not to the sums involved.

Unfortunately, my own country, the United States, has done little to hold up its end of the financial bargain. Some of the more conservative members of Congress have fought hard to undermine government funding for the Cairo initiative. When Congress slashed funding for these programmes in 1996, the 35-per cent cut resulted in 4 million unplanned pregnancies, 1.6 million abortions, 8,000 maternal deaths, and 134,000 infant deaths due to increased high-risk births, according to leading American research organizations.

Members of the Democratic and Republican parties of the United States Congress, in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, have recently addressed some of these concerns by announcing a promising bill that would restore the United States voluntary contribution to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). The voluntary contribution was discontinued as of 1999 in response to objections in Congress over China's one-child policy and concerns over reports on forced abortion and sterilization.

UNFPA, however, has committed itself to ensuring that the incidence of such coercive practices is reduced through new programmes in 32 countries, aimed at abolishing quotas and providing a broader range of reproductive health services. The Executive Director of UNFPA, Dr. Nafis Sadik, has said: "If there were any reports of coercion, we would suspend the programme." By singling out reports in one case as a reason to cut all assistance to UNFPA, the United States has, in effect, inhibited assistance to women and their families in over 160 other nations who depend on its humanitarian aid.

According to the pledge signed in Cairo by world leaders five years ago, Governments have until the year 2015 to make the right of access to reproductive health care and family planning services a reality for all the women of the world.

It bad enough that it took until 1994 to reach this consensus. As 2000 closes in, it is unconscionable that major donors are failing to stay on track.

The year 2015 will not come soon enough for those women and girls for whom pregnancy and childbirth remain life-threatening propositions, nor for those who lack access to and information regarding family planning options or to the same educational and economic opportunities as the men and boys in their communities. It is going to take an enormous global effort to address these issues.

The dock is ticking.

Barbara Becker, who attended the ICPD+5 proceedings, is the Deputy Director of Communications at The Center for Reproductive Law & Policy in New York.