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Nigeria Intends to Promote Family Planning to Curb Swelling Population
December 25, 2007 at 7:27 PM
General Health News
On a more serious note, a demographer and economist from the population ministry, Bassirou Garba, explained that the government's plan is to bring the number of children per woman down to five by 2015.
It intends to achieve this by promoting family planning and aims to have 11 percent of women using some form of contraception by 2015.
One major obstacle to the promotion of family planning is that 59 percent of all mariages in Niger involve girls under the age of 15, Garba said.
Another of the government's aims is to bring this percentage down to 11.
Together these measures should enable the government to get demographic growth down to 2.2 per cent annually, according to official projections.
To succeed, the government will have to overcome serious resistance from Islamic clerics opposed to contraception and from traditionalists who favour early mariage, UN sources say.
With World Bank and UN funding, Niger has started an awareness campaign to sensitise the population to the dangers of the demographic bomb.
Teams made up of traditional chiefs, religious leaders, demographers, economists and leaders of women's groups are criss-crossing the country to talk to villagers and persuade them of the need to change both their views and their behaviour.
Radio and television advertisements reinforce the same message.
All that is very new in this country where virtually the entire population is Muslim and where radical Islamic clerics oppose the government's message on contraception, a practice they see as the "Satanic work of the West".
To combat poverty in Niger, there is no point in pouring billions of dollars into so-called development projects unless measures are first taken to ensure economic growth can keep pace with population growth, one UN expert said.
Source-AFP
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