Family planning a success in Bangladesh: UNFPA

The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) considers Bangladesh’s family planning services ‘a success’ , saying families in the country were getting smaller and more women were using contraceptives.

The Executive Director of the UN-body Dr Babatunde Osotimehi on Wednesday told a crowded press briefing he had seen how Bangladeshi health workers work.

“I have seen these people working in the remotest part of the country providing services,” he said , talking of his visits to Bangladesh.

Osotimehi was speaking to the press on the second day of the Women Deliver conference here in the Malaysian capital.

More than 3,000 delegates of over 150 countries are attending the conference, the largest in the decade.

Malaysia is the first in any Asian country after London and Washington.

Family planning services is seen as ‘rights’ by the UN. The second day of the conference centered round discussions on the issue.

Osotimehi said Bangladesh had trained more health and family planning workers than any other country and the decline of the total fertility rate to 2.3 children per woman from the one-time 6.5 was a great success.

He also extolled government’s initiatives of using internet in the public services and taking it to the rural areas.

The latest Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey also showed the contraceptive use rate had increased to 61 percent from 56 percent in four years and the unmet need declined to 12 percent from 18 percent.

Speaking at a plenary before the press conference, the UNFPA Chief said access to family planning services had been ‘transformative’ in developing countries and that “resources should be allocated internally for its sustainability”.

He vowed that UNFPA would be there with its partners but every country should allocate funds for its family planning services because they, he said, ‘save lives’.

“It empowers women and girls to make positive, productive choices, to seek education and to stay in school, to participate fully in society and to contribute to the economy.

“It allows women and their children to live longer, healthier lives. It enables nations to prosper and promotes peace and stability,” he said.

The Women Deliver conference here is being held just a year after the London Summit where donors pledged to inject $2.6 billion to provide family planning services by 2020 to more than 200 million women who do not have access to it as yet.

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was one of the key donors for fulfilling the pledge.

Its co-chair Melinda Gates at a plenary said these funds were ‘critical’ because “they will help countries implement ambitious national plans”.

“We were not and are not interested in continuing to do what was done before, when more than 200 million women don’t have access,” she said.

Melinda said they are working on a new approach that “gives women what they really want, voluntary access to high-quality health education, health services, and contraceptives”.

She also called upon countries to form “a partnership with women whose voices have fallen on deaf ears for far too long”.

The UNFPA Chief also said the promise of London was ‘energising the international community’.

He reiterated UNFPA’s own commitment “to intensify investment in family planning”.

But he asked countries to make ‘bold and decisive’ commitments to keep women, girls and young people at the heart of any development agenda for its successful outcomes.

“We have witnessed the impact that universal access to family planning can have on the demographic transition of poor countries. The examples of Malaysia, Brazil, Indonesia, Viet Nam, and other countries clearly demonstrate the linkage between family planning and economic development,” he said.

Hopefully that linkage works in Bangladesh as well.