'Issue of increasing population greater than terrorism’

Health minister pledges to accelerate adoption of family planning, spread awareness

ISLAMABAD: With results of the national census, conducted a few months ago, still awaited, the federal health minister, along with provincial officials, have pledged to increase the use of contraceptives in Pakistan from 35 per cent at the moment to 50 per cent by 2020.

Presiding over a World Population Day event in the capital on Tuesday, Minister for National Health Services Saira Afzal Tarar vowed to accelerate efforts towards achieving goals in population planning and access to reproductive health services.



The event was attended by ministers, secretaries, and top officials from all provinces and regions along with heads of partner agencies.

World Population Day 2017 is being observed the world over by governments, international partners and activists on July 11. This year’s theme for the day is “Family Planning: Empowering People, Developing Nations”.

Announcing to raise the contraceptive prevalence in the country by 2020, Tarar explained that they would do this by offering greater contraceptive choice through a mixture of better counselling, and expanding the use of long-acting reversible methods.



She was also pledged to reduce the unmet need among those women who, because of their husbands or social or religious opposition, cannot use contraceptives.

In this regard, the minister said they had decided to focus on increasing awareness, make family planning more accessible, especially to the 100,000 married adolescent girls between the ages of 15-19 to address their unmet needs. Moreover, unmarried youth would be provided reproductive health information through life-skills-based education.

Provincial finance ministers would help the project by increasing financing for the project, moving towards the 2020 goal of spending Rs250 per capita, including both private and public funding, for family planning with support from the federal government.



During Tuesday’s event, Tarar said 60 per cent of the country’s youth was less than 25 years-of-age and needs to be educated about reproductive health and family planning methods along with access to related services.

The minister said Pakistan is one of the few countries where the population has been increasing at a very fast pace and was apprehensive that the results of the recently-concluded census may present an alarming situation of the country.

“The issue of increasing population is greater than terrorism,” she maintained, adding, “but some people also involve religion in this issue too instead of understanding its economic impacts.”

“We fully recognise that issues of sustainability, climate change, women’s empowerment are all embedded in these population trends and deserve our focus,” Tarar said as she noted that the country’s population had nearly doubled from 110 million in 1989 to over 190 million in 2017.

Moreover, she expressed concerns over high maternal and infant child mortality rates in the country, adding that they must come down as pledged in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

“We know that this cannot happen without access to reproductive health services and birth-spacing practices.”

In Pakistan, around 12,000 women die annually while giving birth. Further, children die due to malnutrition and lack of care during the first year of life.

“We cannot allow this to continue,” the health minister stated.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 12^th, 2017.