BRICS ministers to discuss population issues

From February 10 to 13, Brazil will host the 1st Meeting of BRICS Ministers on Population Issues and the 2nd BRICS Seminar of Officials and Experts on Population Matters at Itamaraty Palace, the seat of the Foreign Ministry in Brasília.

The event aims to discuss relevant topics shared by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – whose combined population is about 2.9 billion people – towards a common development agenda on population issues.

The meeting of ministers will take place on Thursday (Feb. 12) under the coordination of Brazil's Secretariat for Strategic Affairs (SAE) and will be attended by Brazilian ministers dealing with population issues, including the Ministry of Social Development and the Ministry of Cities. The delegations from Russia, India, China and South Africa will each be headed by at least one minister in the area.

The topics in the agenda include maternal mortality, AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases; rural-urban migration and urbanization; ageing and intergenerational transfers; gender gap in the workplace and women's role as caretakers of dependent young children and elderly people.

According to the SAE, the four-day event will lead to a work plan as its outcome document. The meeting of ministers from the five countries and the expert seminar on population issues are the result of an action plan approved at the 6th BRICS Summit in July 2014, in Fortaleza, Brazil, and the inaugural experts' seminar held in South Africa last March.

Translated by Mayra Borges