Pakistan can treble per capita income by reducing fertility

Expert says biggest challenge for country is to enhance access to family planning

ISLAMABAD: Harnessing the potential of a large, young and highly skilled population can bring about an economic turnaround – the likes of which many Asian countries have already experienced. But high fertility and growing dependency can prevent Pakistan from moving out of a vicious cycle of poverty and deprivation.

This was said by Population Council Country Director Dr Zeba Sathar while addressing a satellite event of the London Summit in Islamabad on Wednesday which had been jointly organised by the Council, the Health Ministry, United Nation Population Fund and the British High Commission.



Dr Sathar said that while the population growth rate in the country was slowing down, fertility levels remain high when compared to the rest of the region.

“With up to 5 million unwanted pregnancies and an estimated 2 million abortions taking place annually, Pakistan faces a challenge in providing family planning services to all those women and men with unmet needs,” she said.

The council’s director said that Pakistan was set to make strong commitments at the global summit in London because of its intentions to speed up its transition to lower levels of fertility.

“It clearly needs to accelerate its effort to reduce unwanted fertility for reducing maternal and child mortality and for improving human development and economic outcomes,” she said.

If Pakistan is able to adequately regulate the fertility rate, Dr Sathar said that Pakistan would be able to treble its per capita income in 2050 through a rapid decline in fertility.

Health Minister Saira Afzal Tarar, meanwhile, vowed to accelerate efforts towards achieving goals in population planning and access to reproductive health services.

She said that by 2020, Pakistan aims to achieve a contraceptive prevalence rate of 50 per cent. This target, the minister said, would be achieved through additional resources, raising the per capita expenditure on family planning to Rs250, and a programmatic refocus to address the information and service needs of men and young people while introducing safe and long-acting reversible methods through task sharing.



The minister said that Pakistan was quite eager to reap the benefits of a demographic dividend which will become available with the lowering of unmet needs and lower fertility.

The London Family Planning Summit 2017, she said, represents a midpoint to the 2020 goals, and offers an opportunity to re-energise the federal and provincial commitments which were made in 2012 and to accelerate actions to increase access to rights-based family planning.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 13^th, 2017.