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Malawian women’s high fertility rate averaging 6.3 children per woman is among the factors contributing to high population rise despite government’s interventions to balance population growth and available resources, officials have said.
Department of Population Services acting deputy director Grace Hiwa said in an interview in Blantyre Wednesday that another contributing factor to the rise is that 47 percent of the country’s population is “very young and productive”.
But Hiwa mentioned family planning clinics, community-based distribution of family planning methods to motivate people and introduction of population and reproductive health education in the curriculum as some interventions designed to strike the balance.
“We cannot control population growth [as it were] but we put in place measures to ensure a balance between population growth rate and available natural resources,” she said on the sidelines of a population stakeholders meeting in Blantyre.
Hiwa said the family planning campaign is yielding positive results towards controlling population if the rise in contraceptive prevalence rate, from 14 percent in early 1990s to 26 percent in 1998, is anything to go by.
She said, on the other hand, the integration of the subject tackling reproductive health and population and how it affects resources in the education system is geared to empower the youth to make good choices when they marry.
Hiwa also said men have also been taken aboard the population control programme because in a traditional Malawi setting they are decision-makers in families.
In 2001, the National Statistical Office (NSO) said a sample survey conducted in 2000 to provide information on demographic trends and indicators of maternal and child health in Malawi established that Malawi’s fertility rate has dropped from 7.4 children per woman in 1997 and 6.4 in 1998 to the present 6.3.
NSO attributed the development to family planning awareness, higher levels of education among women and the increase in the official minimum marriage age from 17 in 1987 to 19 in 1998.
In contrast, the fertility rates in developed countries like Norway is 1.8 children per woman; two children per woman in the United States; and 1.7 for United Kingdom, according to the United Nations Human Development Report of 2002.
Niger, a developing country, is portrayed as having the highest fertility rate in the world at eight children per woman.
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