• 123 million women do not have adequate access to family planning.
• Each year there are some 80 million unwanted pregnancies with 46 million of them ending in abortion. 20 million of these are performed under unsafe conditions.
• Annually around 600,000 women die of childbirth complications.
• 38 million people live with HIV/AIDS.
• Each year 340 million new cases of sexually transmitted infections occur worldwide.

Responding to these figures, the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ, former GTZ), on behalf of the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), supports health programmes that foster sexual and reproductive health in more than 60 countries worldwide (2004).

These programmes successfully contribute for example to

• the reduction of the maternal mortality rate in Niger and Mongolia

• the support of family planning services in Senegal and the Philippines

• and to the prevention of teenage pregnancies and HIV/AIDS in young people in El Salvador.