The Drum Beat 499 - Addressing Population Growth
This issue includes:
- Use of MASS MEDIA to influence population growth.
- POLL: social norm change related to HIV/AIDS prevention?
- Examples of addressing population through FP CONVERSATIONS.
- Find more on population/FP issues: subscribe to C-CHANGE PICKS.
- Population programming, advocacy, and research RESOURCES.
This issue of the Drum Beat examines a variety of communication strategies and approaches to population-related projects. It includes, among a number of topics, a focus on the link between large family size and environmental degradation, strategies for behaviour change in relation to family planning, and resources for family planning programmes, population advocacy groups, and journalists covering population issues.
CURBING GROWTH THROUGH MASS MEDIA
1. Brazil's Racy Telenovelas Inspire Drop in Birth Rate, Rise in Divorce
by Andrew Downie
This news article, published April 4 2009 by Telegraph.co.uk, evaluates the use of telenovelas, or televised soap operas, to shift attitudes, transform social mores, and shape behaviour around family planning decisions in Brazil. It describes the findings of a study of population data stretching back to 1971 which revealed that "Brazil's popular and often fanciful soap operas have had a direct impact on the nation's divorce and birth rates, as the main channel that broadcast them gradually extended its reach across the country." According to the report, the rate of marriage break-up rose and the number of children born to each woman fell more quickly in areas receiving the TV Globo signal for the first time. Women living in areas covered by the Globo signal were found to have "significantly lower fertility."
2. Ruwan Dare (Midnight Rain) - Nigeria
Launched in July 2007, Ruwan Dare (Midnight Rain) is a two-year radio serial drama being produced by Population Media Center (PMC) in Nigeria. Through character role models, the drama aims to enhance knowledge and use of existing health services, provide information about reproductive and general health issues, encourage family planning, and promote delaying marriage and childbearing until adulthood. It also aims to promote small family norms, provide information about HIV transmission, and motivate people to take actions to improve their health and the health of their families. The production of Ruwan Dare is based on the Sabido methodology, an entertainment-education technique which uses long-running serialised dramas, written and produced in participating countries in local languages, in order to create characters who gradually evolve into positive role models for the audience.
Contact: Kate Elmore elmore@populationmedia.org OR Ephraim Victor Okon program@populationmedia.org
3. Social Marketing for Health: Did It All Begin with Condoms?
by John Davies
This report explores the last 40 years of contributions that contraceptive social marketing (CSM) has made throughout in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Yemen. For example, author John Davies discusses a project centred around an open-air soap opera designed to teach women how to space births using the oral contraceptive pill. Approximately 200 people watch an outdoor soap opera in which a young mother quarrels with her husband and mother-in-law about whether to use contraceptives. Then a character playing a doctor enters and explains the truth about the pill. After the show, the real village doctor sells the contraceptive pill to women after screening them.
4. Mama Ushauri (Mama Advice) - Tanzania
The Tanzania Marketing and Communication (T-MARC) Project produced a radio serial drama on reproductive health called Mama Ushauri (or "Mama Advice" in Kiswahili). The drama, launched 2007, focuses on the life and times of Mama Ushauri and the other members of her fictional peri-urban community of Goromonzi. Every 6 to 10 episodes, T-MARC also sponsors a 10-minute "question and answer" show to allow listeners to ask questions about family planning and to reinforce key messages. Each storyline focuses on women in different phases of their reproductive lives: a young couple contemplating their first pregnancy, a middle-aged couple discussing birth spacing, and an older couple exploring permanent family planning methods.
Contact: Diana Kisaka dkisaka@tmarc.or.tz
5. Umurage Urukwiye - Rwanda's Brighter Future
Umurage Urukwiye is a Rwandan serial radio drama initiated by the Population Media Center. Broadcasting since April 2007, the drama is designed to raise awareness and discussion about issues such as reproductive health, HIV/AIDS, wildlife habitat and natural resource preservation, land conservation, and the promotion of civil harmony. Umurage Urukwiye addresses various issues through 4 story lines, one of which revolves around a rural farmer named Ndereya, living near a gorilla habitat. This serial drama was designed using the Sabido methodology, where audiences learn from the decisions of familiar, identifiable characters and the consequences they face because of their actions, such as the consequences of family size and family planning (Ndereya had more children than he could support).
Contact: Jean Kakule program@populationmedia.org OR Population Media Center info@populationmedia.org
6. Male Motivation Campaign for Family Planning - Guinea
This behaviour change communication (BCC) intervention, carried out by the PRISM project of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Center for Communications Programs, began with advocacy interventions to build support among religious leaders for family planning (FP); Phase II focused on married men, using multimedia interventions to promote spousal communication about FP. Those religious leaders who believed Islam supports the use of FP for child spacing increased from 55% at baseline to 94% at follow-up. Before the programme, 23.3% of men discussed FP with someone; afterward, 44.9% had discussed FP. Men with no campaign exposure showed an 18.2% knowledge level (could name at least one modern FP method), compared to a 92.6% knowledge level with a high level of exposure. At no exposure, 1.9% of men reported using a FP method, compared to 13.8% with high exposure.
Contact: webmaster@jhuccp.org
7. Moving Family Planning Programs Forward: Learning from Success in Zambia, Malawi, and Ghana
by Julie Solo
This 2005 evaluation report shares information from three case studies undertaken in countries that were identified as having been successful in increasing contraceptive use and lowering fertility - Ghana, Malawi, and Zambia. The case studies were part of the Repositioning Family Planning programme, and were intended to identify lessons learned to guide strategy development and identify key investments. The research found that family planning programmes in these three countries were successful not just through supply side interventions, but also through effective and innovative efforts on the demand side, including both working with the communities and bringing services closer to rural populations. Key messages including radio jingles, posters, dramas, health talks, and community-based distribution activities were developed in consultation with the community to ensure that they were appropriate and meaningful.
What is the most persistent problem facing marginalised female children?
Problem:
- Lack of access to education.
- Lack of inheritance and ownership rights.
- Societal acceptance of sexual teasing and harassment.
- Forced customs related to sexuality: e.g., FGM, arranged marriage, involuntary prostitution.
VOTE and COMMENT click here.
RESULTS thus far (July 3):
57%: Lack of access to education.
29%: Forced customs related to sexuality: e.g., FGM, arranged marriage, involuntary prostitution.
8%: Societal acceptance of sexual teasing and harassment.
6%: Lack of inheritance and ownership rights.
ADDRESSING POPULATION THROUGH FAMILY PLANNING CONVERSATIONS
8. Phone Hotline Spreads Family Planning Information in DR Congo
by Catherine Toth
This case study describes how Population Services International (PSI), under their Family Planning Project (FPP), set up and managed la Ligne Verte (which is a "hotline" in French) in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). It also explores the lessons learned that may point to the use of cell phone technology as a powerful new tool for health education, especially in countries that have little communications infrastructure. Because a woman in DRC is 3 times more likely to adopt a modern method of family planning if she has a conversation with a knowledgeable person, the FPP launched la Ligne Verte, on which, by dialling a toll-free number, callers can speak to a trained educator and get accurate information about birth spacing in general, the correct use of family planning methods, how to avoid unwanted pregnancy, and the location of the nearest Association de Santé Familiale (ASF) partner clinic.
9. Impact Data - Reproductive Health for Married Adolescent Couples Project (RHMACP) - Nepal
Launched in 2005, this 2-year project was designed to address the large population of married Nepalese adolescents with unmet needs for reproductive health information and services. The project established a peer education network to disseminate reproductive health information to married couples; supported local health facilities to provide youth-friendly services; and fostered an enabling environment among parents, in-laws, and influential community members to increase married adolescents' access to, and use of, health services. The percentage of female respondents who thought there were benefits to delaying childbearing increased from 90% to 99% (n=480); for male respondents, the figure rose from 93% to 96%. The percentage of adolescents who thought that the ideal age at gauna (when a married girl moves into her husband's home for consummation of the marriage) for: 1) women was over 20 increased from 6% to 34% (for female respondents) and from 9% to 28% (for male respondents); and 2) men was over 20 rose from 55% to 91% among female respondents and from 54% to 82% among male respondents. At endline, 83% of female respondents and 71% of male respondents believed that the ideal age of motherhood was over 20, up from 50% and 53%, respectively.
10. Extra Mile Initiative (EMI) - Madagascar
The 2-year Extra Mile Initiative (EMI), initiative, 2005-2007, was designed to address spiraling tensions between environmental degradation, economic stagnation, and overpopulation - which led the government of that country to reverse its pronatalist stance and make family planning (FP) and health, one of 8 pillars of its development action plan. The project's name indicates the effort to reach - by motorcycle, canoe and, mostly, on foot - 6 remote communes that border conservation zones, where ecological resources are under pressure from a growing population. EMI trained commune health centre staff to use Cycle Beads (a tool to help those using the calendar or Standard Days method) and to organise and implement FP education and service provision in the communes. EMI guided a system of citizen volunteers in providing their own villages with information, and, in the case of Community Health Agents (CHAs), contraceptives, and provided Social Development Committees (SDCs) with basic information on FP and maternal/child health, capacity-building management and oversight actions, and tools for ensuring good governance through, by example, communicating responsibilities related to gender and human rights issues.
Contact: Care International website
by Elkan E. Daniel, Rekha Masilamani, and Mizanur Rahman
From the December 2008 International Family Planning Perspectives, this paper explores the impact of a Pathfinder International/India programme, the Promoting Change in Reproductive Behavior in Bihar (PRACHAR) Project, which aimed to promote contraceptive use for delaying and spacing births by involving the whole community. A favourable social environment was created through the orientation and training of reproductive health teams of community leaders and influential residents, and through group meetings with young couples' parents and in-laws; messages were disseminated through street theatre performances and wall paintings; and formal and informal rural health service providers were trained on reproductive health issues and contraception. In addition, unmarried adolescents received information through a 3-day workshop, and newlywed couples via infotainment parties; group meetings and at-home individual counselling sessions were held for young married women and, separately, young married men. Evaluators assert that the PRACHAR model is replicable throughout Bihar and has relevance in other contexts.
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The C-Change Picks website and e-magazine both feature selections of projects, evaluations, strategic thinking, resources, and events and meetings included on The CI website that have been specifically highlighted by the C-Change programme. Funded by USAID, C-Change works with global, regional, and local partners to apply behaviour change and social change communication approaches in the health sector - HIV and AIDS, family planning and reproductive health, malaria, and primary health care - and is expanding to the environmental sector.
The C-Change Picks e-magazine is published regularly and features resources recently highlighted by C-Change.
SUBSCRIBE by contacting cchange@comminit.com For a comprehensive view of all of the resources highlighted thus far, visit the C-Change Picks website.
RESOURCES FOR PROGRAMMING, ADVOCACY, AND RESEARCH
12. World Population Data Sheet
Population Reference Bureau's World Population Data Sheet, in a wallchart format, contains the latest population estimates, projections, and other key indicators for 200 countries, including births, deaths, natural increase, infant mortality, total fertility, life expectancy, urban population, contraceptive use, HIV/AIDS infection, land area, and population per square mile.
by Sharif M. I. Hossain, M.E. Khan, Ricardo Vernon, Jill Keesbury, Ian Askew, John Townsend, and Victoria Rumbold
The ECP Handbook provides comprehensive guidance to help managers of integrated reproductive health programmes, health care directors, and policymakers introduce emergency contraceptive pills (ECPs) within local and national family planning programmes. Operations research has demonstrated the feasibility and acceptability of ECPs as a way of preventing unintended pregnancy following unprotected sex or failure of an existing contraceptive method. The handbook presents a step-by-step process for introducing ECPs that can be adapted to each country's needs and resources. In addition, the handbook discusses ways to address the needs of specific segments of the population, including special groups, such as adolescents and rape survivors.
Since September 1945, the Population Reference Bureau (PRB) has published a quarterly bulletin in hard-copy and electronic format that covers subjects related to domestic and international population research. Each Bulletin treats a specific topic - ranging from immigration to world health to gender. Issues are distributed to members of the PRB and include graphs and tables, references, and suggested resources.
15. A Resource Package for Family Planning and Beyond: The ACQUIRE Project Digital Archive
This electronic archive constitutes the legacy of the ACQUIRE Project - Access, Quality, and Use in Reproductive Health (2003-2008). ACQUIRE 's goal was to increase the use of reproductive health/family planning services, with a focus on facility-based services and clinical contraception, especially long-acting and permanent methods of contraception (LAPMs). The archive has been designed as a searchable knowledge resource for the RH/FP community.
16. Reporting on Population, Health, and the Environment: A Guide for Central American Journalists
This 2007 Population Reference Bureau publication provides data and background information on the connections between population, health, and the environment in Central America to help Central American journalists cover these issues. The guide provides key data and information as well as story ideas and information sources. The human interest stories are included to help journalists focus attention on the topics and build connections between people and communities. Topics covered include the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), pollution, human health, economic development, loss of natural resources, food production, natural hazards, and risks to vulnerable groups such as the economically poor, elderly, and women.
by Judy Oglethorpe, Cara Honzak, and Cheryl Margoluis
This 2008 manual outlines an approach that integrates health and voluntary family planning into conservation projects, developing synergies that improve the health of both people and ecosystems. The approach, called the population-health-environment (PHE) approach, involves conservation organisations partnering with the health sector. According to the manual, taking advantage of synergies between human and ecosystem health can improve maternal and child health; enable couples to have the number of children they want, when they want them; reduce unsustainable pressures on the environment; promote sustainable ecosystem services such as reliable water supplies; and often improve community food security and livelihoods. The manual draws on the experiences, successes, and lessons from the last five years of PHE work in World Wildlife Fund/Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) and other organisations.
by Imelda Ferani and Maria Borda
This 2008 United States Agency for International Development Health Policy Initiative (USAID) document describes progress in achieving the goals of the Uttar Pradesh (UP) Population Policy adopted in 2000. It includes the implications of alternative fertility and mortality trends during the next decade, and strategies and programme initiatives recommended by national and state policymakers and other experts. Following a project analysis, recommendations were presented in December of 2007 at the Lucknow, UP, India, roundtable as strategies for new initiatives in UP's Reproductive and Child Health Program to help move the state closer to the goal of population stabilisation.
by Roy Jacobstein
This advocacy brief, published in 2008 by the ACQUIRE Project, answers key questions about long-acting and/or permanent family planning methods, which include intrauterine devices (IUDs or IUCDs), implants, female sterilisation, and vasectomy. Written in a question-and-answer format, the brief is designed for policy and reproductive health decision-makers such as health ministers, but is written in a way designed to be accessible to anyone within the reproductive health sector. The brief gives a short overview of family planning in Southern Africa, emphasising the existing unmet need for family planning programmes and methods that are effective.
This issue of The Drum Beat was written by Julie Levy.
The Editor of The Drum Beat is Kier Olsen DeVries.
Please send material for The Drum Beat to The CI's Editorial Director - Deborah Heimann dheimann@comminit.com
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Comments
The need to understand human population dynamics.......
Imagine for a moment that we are looking at an ocean wave, watching it move toward the shore where it crashes finally at our feet. The wave is moving toward us; however, at the same time, there are many molecules in the wave that are moving in the opposite direction, against the tide. If we observe that the propagation of the human species worldwide is like the wave and the reproduction numbers of individuals in certain locales are like the molecules, it may be inaccurate for the latter to be looked at as if it tells us something meaningful about the former.
Abundant research indicates that most countries in Western Europe, among many other countries globally, have recently shown a decline in human population growth. These geographically localized data need not blind us to the fact that the absolute global human population numbers are skyrocketing. The world’s human population is like the wave; the individual or localized reproduction numbers are like the molecules.
Perhaps a “scope of observation” problem is presented to everyone who wants to adequately understand the dynamics of human population numbers.
Choosing a scope of observation is a forced choice, like choosing to look at either the forest or the trees, at either the propagation numbers of the human species (the wave data) or localized reproduction numbers (the molecular data). Data regarding the propagation of absolute global human population numbers is the former while individual or localized reproduction data are the latter.
From this vantage point, the global challenge before humanity could be a species propagation problem. Take note that global propagation numbers do not vary with the reproduction data. That is to say, global human propagation data and the evidence of reproduction numbers of individuals in many places, appear to be pointing in different directions. The propagation data are represented by the wave; the reproduction data are represented by the molecules moving against the tide.
In the year 1900 world’s human population was approximately 1.2 to 1.6 billion people. With the explosive growth of the global human population over the 20th century in mind (despite two world wars, ubiquitous local conflicts, famine, pestilence, disease, poverty, and other events resulting in great loss of life), what might the world look like in so short a period of time as 41 years from now? How many people will be on the planet at that time? The UN Population has recently made its annual re-determination that the world’s human population will reach 9.2 billion people around 2050, and then somehow level off. No explanation is given for how this leveling-off process is to occur.
We can see that the fully anticipated growth of absolute global human population numbers is about 8 billion people for the 150 year period between 1900 and 2050.
Whatever the number of human beings on Earth at the end of the 21st century, the size of the human population on Earth could have potentially adverse impacts on the number of the world’s surviving species, on the rate of dissipation of Earth’s resources, and on the basic characteristics of global ecosystems.
For too long a time human population growth has been comfortably viewed by politicians, economists and demographers as somehow outside the course of nature. The potential causes of global human population growth have seemed to them so complex, obscure, or numerous that a strategy to address the problems posed by the unbridled growth of the human species has been assumed to be unknowable. Their preternatural, insufficiently scientific grasp of human population dynamics has lead to widely varied forecasts of global population growth. Some forecasting data indicate the end to human population growth soon. Other data suggest the rapid and continuous increase of human numbers through Century XXI and beyond.
Recent scientific evidence appears to indicate that the governing dynamics of absolute global human population numbers are indeed knowable, as a natural phenomenon. According to unchallenged scientific research, the population dynamics of human organisms is essentially common to, not different from, the population dynamics of other organisms.
To suggest, as many politicians, economists and demographers have been doing, that understanding the dynamics of human population numbers does not matter, that the human population problem is not about numbers, or that human population dynamics have so dizzying an array of variables as not to be suitable for scientific investigation, seems not quite right.
If I may continue by introducing an extension of my perspective.
According to the research of Russell Hopfenberg,Ph.D., and David Pimementel, Ph.D., global population growth of the human species is a rapidly cycling positive feedback loop in which food availability drives population growth and this recent, astounding growth in absolute global human numbers gives rise to the misperception or mistaken impression that food production needs to be increased even more.
Data indicate that the world’s human population grows by approximately two percent per year. All segments of it grow by about 2%. Every year there are more people with brown eyes and more people with blue ones; more people who are tall and more short people. It also means that there are more people growing up well fed and more people growing up hungry. The hungry segment of the global population goes up just like the well-fed segment of the population. We may or may not be reducing hunger by increasing food production; however, we are most certainly producing more and more hungry people.
Hopfenberg’s and Pimentel’s evidence suggests that the magnificently successful efforts of humankind to increase food production in order to feed a growing population has resulted and continue to result in even greater human population numbers.
The perceived need to increase food production to feed a growing population is a widely shared and consensually validated misperception, a denial both of the physical reality and the space-time dimension. If people are starving at a given moment of time, increasing food production cannot help them. Are these starving people supposed to be waiting for sowing, growing and reaping to be completed? Are they supposed to wait for surpluses to reach them? Without food they would die. In such circumstances, increasing food production for people who are starving is like tossing parachutes to people who have already fallen out of the airplane. The produced food arrives too late; however, this does not mean human starvation is inevitable.
Consider that human population dynamics are not biologically different from the population dynamics of other species. Human organisms, other species and even microorganisms have essentially similar population dynamics. We do not find hoards of starving roaches, birds, squirrels, alligators, or chimpanzees in the absence of food as we do in many “civilized” human communities today because these non-human species are not annually increasing their food production capabilities.
Please take note that among tribal peoples in remote original habitats, we do not find people starving. Like non-human species, “primitive” human beings live within the carrying capacity of their environment. History is replete with examples of early humans and more remote ancestors not increasing their food production annually, but rather living successfully off the land for thousands upon thousands of years as hunters and gatherers of food.
Prior to the agricultural revolution and the production of more food than was needed for immediate survival, human numbers supposedly could not grow beyond their environment’s physical capacity to sustain them because global human population growth or decline is primarily determined by food availability. Looked at from a global population perspective, more food equals more human organisms; less food equals less human organisms; and, in one and all cases, no food equals no humans.
Thank you.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176
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