Family Planning

Last year a member of the World Bank professional staff gave a lecture on development in Africa on the UC Berkeley campus. His audience asked him about rapid population growth in that continent. He immediately dismissed the question, saying that population growth did not need any special attention. It would look after itself. He was voicing an uncritical interpretation of the demographic transition, a “theory” which has as much evidence to support it as the fictitious Da Vinci Code, and like the Da Vinci Code it remains perennially popular.

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The following report documents how, over the next 30 to 40 years in parts of sub- Saharan Africa, between 100 million and 200 million people are likely to be without sustainable food supplies. This was the conclusion of a multidisciplinary group of experts from Africa and North America, who asked what will happen in the Sahel when new projections of global warming are combined with rapid population growth. The meeting was not the first on the Sahel, but the breadth of expertise in agriculture, climatology, demography, family planning, the status of women, terrorism, and national security...

Last spring at a Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) talk in Berlin, Melinda Gates used this phrase, “The most transformative thing you can do is to give people access to birth control.” She expressed similar sentiments at the London Summit on Family Planning on July 11, 2012, as did the British Prime Minister David Cameron, and Andrew Mitchell who was then Secretary of State for the Department for International Development, the British equivalent of United States Agency for International Development. The London Summit represented a new focus on international family planning after...

Background

In Sub-Saharan Africa, policy changes have begun to pave the way for community distribution of injectable contraceptives but sustaining such efforts remains challenging. Combining social marketing with community-based distribution provides an opportunity to recover some program costs and compensate workers with proceeds from contraceptive sales. This paper proposes a model for increasing access to injectable contraceptives in rural settings by using community-based distributers as social marketing agents and incorporating financing systems to improve...