POPULATION: South Asia Could Learn From Sri Lanka

By Feizal Samath Reprint | | Print |

Feizal Samath

COLOMBO, Oct 21 1997 (IPS) - In the world’s fastest growing region, tiny Sri Lanka could teach its giant neighbour India and Pakistan how best to promote population programmes.

With maternal mortality rates at 40 deaths per 100,000 women and infant deaths at 17 in the first year of life per 1,000 live births, Sri Lanka is in the low-needs category of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).

While India, the world’s second most populous country, has had mixed success with population control, Pakistan is trailing behind Bangladesh, among the world’s poorest countries.

Praising Sri Lanka’s progress, Nafis Sadik, the executive director of the UNFPA, said on Monday that the country “is one of the world’s success stories in reducing maternal and infant mortality and slowing population growth”.

She said that UNFPA planned to use Sri Lanka’s success as an example in promoting programmes in South Asia and the rest of the world.

One of the UNFPA’s projects in Sri Lanka, under the planned 7.6 million dollars programme between 1997-2000, is reproductive health education — which includes family planning and sexual health — through schools and school curricula.

Under this, it is aimed to address the issues of reproductive health including HIV/AIDS and gender so that young people would be equipped to face the challenge of adulthood. The training of teachers and approaching peers and parents to enable students to have responsible sexual behaviour is another activity envisaged by the project, according to a briefing note.

On Sunday, addressing the Colombo meeting of the ‘Safe Motherhood Initiative’ which has brought together about 240 participants from across the world, Sadik said that “we must show governments that the public wants and believes in safe motherhood for all, and that they will support it with their taxes.”

“We must show the private sector that safe motherhood is also their business.” Sadik said that it has been shown that safe motherhood is possible in all communities, if the political will exists to empower women and provide the necessary services.

She urged delegates to work towards moving this area higher up in the development agenda of governments and took Sri Lanka as an example, with its 50-year tradition of women’s education, political involvement and self-reliance combined with universally-available health services and emphasis on reproductive health.

Safe motherhood, she noted, was part of the human right of every woman to reproductive health, to freedom from discrimination on the grounds of gender, and to self- determination in everyday life.

“We said it very clearly 10 years ago and we should say it even more loudly today — no country, no culture can call itself civilised until its women, whether mothers or not, are safe, secure and equal,” she said to thunderous applause from the gathering.

The Safe Motherhood Initiative, which began in 1987, is marking its 10th anniversary this year and the group spearheaded by the UK-based International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), is meeting in Sri Lanka’s capital, Colombo, between October 18 to 23 to find out how the initiative — which stimulated action in more than 100 countries around the world — has worked.

The delegates are expected to reach a consensus on what must be done to make motherhood safer, a goal that governments from every world region have agreed is an international priority, according to a pre-conference statement.

The Sri Lankan capital was chosen as a venue because of the government’s success in bringing fertility to near replacement level that would stabilise population growth within 50 years when the country’s population will be 24 million compared with 18.5 million now.

But, Sadik said, within this success there were some problems like the rising number of unsafe abortions. According to estimates, the number of abortions per day in Sri Lanka is between 500 to 750 with a large percentage being married women. “So why are they not using contraceptives. We need to study the reasons for this and maybe good education programmes could help,” Sadik told reporters before leaving Colombo after a three-day visit.

Sadik said that one of the most important social changes in Sri Lanka was that young people were getting married later in

life. The average age at marriage is now 25 for women and 29 for men, higher than anywhere in South Asia.

“Let us face the fact that many of these unmarried young men and women would be sexually active. Let us not condemn any more young women to unwanted and risky pregnancy, or to the misery, pain and suffering of an unsafe and illegal abortion,” she said.

Sadik urged young men to take more responsibility for their own reproductive health and that of their partners. Highlighting domestic violence as a serious and growing problem for women in Sri Lanka, Sadik stressed that violence in the home was just as unacceptable as outside it “and we must speak out against those responsible.”