Delegates from all the five East African Community partner states descended on the northern Tanzanian town of Arusha this week to attend a high-level multisectoral stakeholder consultative meeting, seen as an impetus in mooting common strategies to address key reproductive health and sexual challenges.

The meeting, organised by the EAC Secretariat and jointly sponsored by UNFPA and the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), is mainly focusing on the progress taken towards the implementation of the so-called Maputo Plan of Action.

The plan, signed in Maputo, Mozambique in September, 2006 by African Health ministers, seeks to improve universal access to comprehensive sexual and reproductive health services across the continent.

Organisers say the meeting was convened to help ignite the badly needed commitment from state and non-state actors towards the implementation of strategies pertinent to the achievement of the global 2015 health goals.

"We need to move away from the old mentality that confined us to our national borders and understand that issues of reproductive health and sexual rights have long become cross-border challenges,” Lydia Wanyoto, a member of the East African Legislative Assembly (EALA) said yesterday in her keynote address at Impala Hotel.

"It is important that we approach these challenges from a broader perspective. For instance Uganda and Kenya need to put together their efforts and devise a strategy to fight female genital mutilation practices along our common border.

When we try to fight it on the side of Uganda, the local communities use ‘Kenyan specialists’ who sneak in and after circumcising women, they run away across the border,” the Ugandan politician said.

The head of the Rwandan delegation to the meeting, MP Ezekias Rwabuhihi, told this reporter that Rwanda had already made significant progress under the Maputo Plan of Action, but highlighted the need to integrate the Plan into the mainstream national health programmes.

"Take an example; you cannot talk of HIV/Aids without considering the issues of reproductive health and sexual rights. Just as it took long debates for the Global Fund to include Malaria and Tuberculosis in its programmes, I know continued advocacy will result in increased action and attention on reproductive health issues.

While the Global Fund should consider this health aspect, individual countries can also make a difference,” added Rwabuhihi, who currently heads the Rwandan Parliamentary Network for Population and Development.

But while delegates are striving to identify gaps, challenges and opportunities in the implementation of the Maputo Plan of Action during this three-day gathering, civic groups insist that the continent needed to urgently put into action "the many beautiful policies” that are already in place.

"We simply need to get down to work and fulfil whatever we have promised,” said Dr Chi-Chi Undi, an Associate Research Specialist at the Nairobi-based African Population and Health Research Centre.

Participants are devising mechanisms of ensuring that all segments of EAC societies are actively involved in the Maputo Plan of Action in one way or another.

Rwanda is represented by eight delegates, two of them parliamentarians.

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