International Conference on Population and Development

The International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), held in Cairo, Egypt, in 1994, was one of a series of United Nations world conferences of the decade that achieved significant decisions to promote gender equality and the advancement of the world's women. This conference of 180 United Nations (UN) Member States produced an agreement, the Program of Action, which connected demographic issues of managing the expansion of global population and sustainable world development to the promotion of women's welfare and rights to education, health, and reproductive services.

In the 1980s and 1990s, neoliberal “globalization” of the world's economy and structural adjustment programs (SAPs) promoted by Western governments, the World Bank, and other international lenders resulted in severe cutbacks to state-sponsored social welfare spending generally and to funds for family planning in particular in both the north and the south.

This pushed the world's poor-overwhelmingly women and children-into a state of crisis and, in turn, provoked “push back” from progressive social forces, including feminist activists who expressed themselves locally as well as internationally at UN world conferences. Following the pattern of transnational feminist activism set at the 1993 Human Rights Conference in Vienna, women's nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) were an especially active and effective lobbying force at the 1994 ICPD hosted by the UN in Cairo. The NGO Women's Environment and Development Organization (WEDO) organized a Women's Caucus of 300 women and men from 62 countries that formed alliances among population control groups, environmental groups, and women's rights groups and that was active at every conference preparatory meeting.