VIEWPOINT
Centrality of Population to Development
The Concept of Development
In the last couple of decades the concept of "development" has been redefined to cover much more than Gross Domestic Product or GDP per capita as was formerly the case. The concept has been broadened to account for the quality of people's lives, their education and health needs, job prospects, food security, access to clean water, good housing, transport and sanitation, and the quality of their environment. All need to be incorporated in any assessment of whether "development" is taking place in a particular country. More recently, the question of governance has also featured highly, whether local level communities are able to express their needs adequately and whether officialdom is responsive to these needs.
Emphasis is also given to the equitable distribution of the benefits of development, both across socio-economic groups and regions, and to ensuring that women's status is uplifted and that they have equal access with males to lifetime opportunities. Furthermore, whenever development occurs it has become important to ensure that the process is sustainable, that current generations are not consuming natural resources at the expense of future
generations.
Human Development
At the core of this concept of development lies human development, with a renewed focus on fulfilment of the human potential and on improving people's well-being and the quality of their lives. Human development is concerned also with enlarging people's choices, for this generation as well as for the next generation. Clearly, protecting the environment and ensuring its rejuvenation and the long term productivity of natural resources are essential.
Population Dynamics and Development
The focus on human development - "putting people first" - necessarily involves accounting for a country's population dynamics, its total population size and growth rate, its distribution between towns, cities and villages, its age and sex structure etc. In order to monitor progress in the
development process and to plan for improvements in the future it is essential to have a sound data and information base on the population and to project its size, structure and distribution. In this way social and economic planners can mobilize resources in order to construct the necessary
schools, clinics, roads etc. to meet the basic needs of an expanding population.
On the other hand it is equally important to allow individuals the greatest freedom of choice over the number of children they wish to bear. They must be provided with adequate information about the pros and cons of a large or small family size, the disadvantages for family budgets from having too many children, and the adverse health consequences for mothers and children of having too many children, too closely spaced or bearing children under the age of 20 and over the age of 35. Couples and unmarried adolescents who are becoming sexually active at an increasingly earlier age need to know about the range of traditional and modern contraceptives available; and these quality services need to be appropriately located according to the distribution of the population and they need to be staffed with well-trained, highly motivated and sympathetic staff who can offer reasoned advice without coercion.Photo by Richard Majchrzak
Of course, a well-educated, healthy and highly skilled population will display high levels of productivity which will promote development, as broadly defined above. From such economic growth, savings can be invested in further improving the quality of the nation's human resources and capital stock. On the other hand many poor underdeveloped countries are destined to stay poor because their human resources base is fragile, income levels are low, economic growth is negligible while, more often than not, their rates of population growth are relatively high. In simple terms their economies need to run' in order to accommodate a rapidly growing population at constant and meagre income levels.
Herein lies the dilemma for development practitioners: how to break into this vicious circle such that real incomes and other indices of
development improve in order to accommodate growing populations? And how to ensure that individuals and couples have adequate information and contraceptive and reproductive health services to make rational decisions over family size?
Policies for Sustainable Development in the Pacific
Without doubt, population concerns lie at the very heart of broadly defined 'sustainable development'. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Pacific island countries where population-related programmes have made substantial progress in recent years. Social indicators exceed expectations for countries at their stage of development as current measures of life expectancy, health and education reveal how much progress has been made. However, the road ahead presents new and profound challenges.
Success in promoting family planning and the use of contraception has been achieved by persuading the urban, more educated residents to change their demographic behaviour. The greatest challenge lies ahead in convincing rural couples that it is in their best interest to bear fewer, well-spaced children, concepts which may not be obvious in a largely agricultural-based, household economy. New and innovative methods are needed to disseminate the population message via the influential traditional
leadership and churches who, perhaps, have not been fully utilised in the past but who are held in great esteem by the local populace. Improvements in the provision of quality services, especially reproductive health services, particularly in rural areas, are required to facilitate this process.
New population-related problems are also presenting themselves in the form of rising rates of adolescent fertility, sexually transmitted diseases
entailing the ever-present threat of an HIV/AIDS epidemic, and disenchantment with local, rural-based clinics and health facilities. Rural-urban migration continues unabated and immense pressure is being
exerted on urban infrastructure, the job market and the environment. As traditional authority breaks down there is concern over rising substance abuse, crime, domestic violence and suicide in some countries.
These challenges require innovative population-accommodating and population-influencing policies to be incorporated into comprehensive national population and development policies and programmes. Such policies need to go hand-in-hand with detailed implementation plans which have yet to
be formulated in most of the island countries. These should entail a detailed accounting of the financial and human resource costs of implementing the policies, including the resource requirements for
meeting the goals and targets of the Programme of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development held in Cairo in 1994.
by William J. House,
CST Adviser on Population Policies and Development Strategies