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Technical Advisor for the UNFPA Regional Office in Bangkok, Rabbi Royan at World Population Day. |
Ahead of China's sixth census beginning in November this year an initiative has been launched to ensure that everyone in the country has access to basic public services during the process of urbanisation in China.
United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), China National Bureau of Statistics, China's National Development and Reform Commission and China's National Population and Family Planning Commission launched the initiative at the United Nations Pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo on World Population Day.
Representative of UNFPA China, Dr. Bernard Coquelin, said that the theme of this year's World Population Day "Everybody Counts", is consistent with the theme of 2010 Shanghai World Expo "Better City, Better Life" and that the main body of the urbanszation process is people. High-quality population data plays a vital role in making policies and improving people's quality of life.
Technical Advisor for the UNFPA Regional Office in Bangkok, Rabbi Royan shared the experience of the Asia-Pacific countries' use of population data for policy development. The examples show that population data, especially census data, can play a very important role in a country's development plans, including poverty reduction strategies, reducing gender-bias and maternal mortality and limiting the effect of natural disasters.
In the near future, more than 50% of China's population will be urban. How to handle the relationship between the population and the city will be the key to the success of promoting healthy urbanization. To this end, UNFPA supports Chinese population studies and recently conducted a survey on sex-disaggregated data in cooperation with the National Bureau of Statistics. |
