Empower the poor to manage families
Commentary
By
Nelson Keyonzo
| Nov 05, 2015
Statistics tell us that poor women have over 40 per cent more children than they desire while rich women are able to have exactly the number they desire.
Nowhere is this illustrated better than in Kenya's slums, where six out of every 10 people living in urban areas are found.
These are dwellings characterised by poor access to healthcare and reproductive health services, early sexual debut and high-risk sexual behaviour.
In Nairobi slums for instance, surveys have indicated that about seven out of every ten women aged below 20 years have had an unintended pregnancy.
While some in urban areas enjoy better access to health services and therefore better health outcomes, the urban poor tend to have larger family sizes, have less knowledge of and access to family planning methods and services, and are less likely to use contraception than wealthier urban residents.
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It is generally agreed that family planning has for long been acknowledged as one of the development interventions with wide-ranging potential benefits, including improvement of maternal and child health outcomes, educational advances, economic development, and women's empowerment.
While Kenya has seen some considerable increase in contraceptive use and substantial decline in fertility, unmet needs for FP, (which refers to the proportion of sexually active women who want to avoid or postpone childbearing but are not using any method of contraception), remains high at about 18 per cent.
The slums in particular continue to report births that are either unwanted or mistimed.
The consequences of unplanned pregnancies are wide-ranging and are felt within a family for generations, but also nationally as they affect household economic conditions, population growth, and the attainment goals such as the recently-adopted Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Initiatives such as the Urban Reproductive Health have been working to increase use of modern contraceptives among the urban poor.
Evidence from the project indicates that use of contraceptives not only rises when they are provided alongside other maternal and child health services, but also when communication campaigns are designed to appeal to their circumstances.
Within the four years of the project, substantial increases were reported in the towns of Nairobi (44 to 55 per cent), Mombasa (29 to 44 per cent), Kisumu (44 to 59 per cent), Kakamega (46 to 54 per cent) and Machakos (45 to 58 per cent).
With almost all global population growth projected to occur in towns and cities in developing countries over the coming decades, and with many of those coming into towns expected to live in slums, failing to give them the knowledge and facilities to manage family size can only invite social and economic catastrophe.
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