The International Conference on Population and Development was held in Cairo. Egypt, between 5 and 13 in September, 1994, where more than 15 thousand people gathered, including about 3,500 government representatives from about 180 countries. In this Conference a new Program of Action was unanimously adopted, which delineated the goals and programs for population and development for the next two decades between 1995 and 2015. In this essay I briefly described global population trends and its economic and ecological implications, stated the temporal progress from arguments in the three Preparatory Committees toward the achievement of consensus at the end of the Cairo Conference, summarized and commented each chapter of the Program of Action, clarified the major characteristics of the Cairo document compared to the documents in Bucharest and Mexico City, and finally discussed the effectiveness of the strategy suggested in the Cairo document for addressing population and development issues in the context of sustainability.
The key concept of the Cairo program of action is reproductive rights and health and the empowerment of women. The idea originated from the feminist movement among developed countries in the 1970s and diffused globally due to the United Nations International Conference on Women held in Nairobi in 1985. The essence of this idea is that women have the rights to decide how many, when, and in what interval they have children and, thus, should have the full information and high-quality services for regulating their own fertility, including both contraception and safe abortion.
By adopting this new concept, the emphasis of the Cairo Conference was put on NGOs rather than governments, individuals, especially women, rather than a society, or, generally speaking, the micro-level rather than the macro-level.
In Bucharest Conference held in 1974, there was a fierce debate, around the issue of whether governments should intervene fertility trends in order to control rapid population growth, between the advocates of population policies and those who asserted "development was the best contraceptives", and the World Population Plan of Action was adopted as a result of compromise. In Mexico Conference held in 1984, the necessity of family planning programs was almost unanimously accepted among major developing countries as an indispensable part of development policies.
In Cairo, family planning seems to have been redefined as a means for achieving individuals' reproductive goals rather than a government instrument for population contro1 policies, by adopting the idea of reproductive health as a broader concept including family planning.
In the Program of Action, on the premise that women-centered and bottom-up approach for family planning can solve population issues, the estimates of financial resources necessary for meeting the latent demand (unmet need) for family planning and reproductive health services in developing countries and Eastern European countries for the next two decades was written in, which will have to be mobilized both nationally and internationally. It was epoch-making, compared with the documents for the previous two Conferences.
Whether such a Cairo strategy, some say " feminist approach", can be effective for addressing acute population and development issues, especially in such hot spots as sub-Sahara Africa, West Asia, and South Asia, remains to be seen.