Empower African women to reduce population boom
A public health professor, Professor Hans Rosling, has said for Africa to get out of poverty, there was the need to provide equal and quality educational opportunities for women.
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When the girl-child was educated, he said, she would grow to become an empowered woman who knows the benefit of child spacing to her health and that of her children.
Prof. Rosling, who is with the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, made this known when he paid a visit to the International Network for the Demographic Evaluation of
Population and Their Health (INDEPTH Network) in Accra.
The INDEPTH Network is a network of health and demographic surveillance systems (HDSSs) with 45 member centres, which observes, through 52 HDSS field sites, the life events of over three millions of people in 20 low and middle-income countries in Africa, Asia and Oceania, to help provide a more complete picture of the health status of communities.
Prof. Rosling said if the African population was not checked through birth control, 80 per cent of the world population will be in Africa and Asia by the year 2100.
He said what Africa needed today was faster economic growth and not an increase in its population and therefore, called on leaders to use the money generated wisely to benefit the majority of the public.
An international public speaker and founder of the Gapminder Foundation, Prof. Rosling added that “If done, Africa will produce skilled economy and skilled manpower”, saying that the potential for Africa to improve on the quality of its population was high.
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Birth control
“When you increase gender equity, it will stop increase in children”, he said.
However, he said the provision of contraception across Africa was a problem, saying that although people were ready to use them, the contraceptives were not readily available.
Today, he said, due to high illiteracy rates in Africa, women had high fertility rates and the cycle of poverty continued but said “when you start to take care of the poorest, they will move from their impoverished situation”.
“When women are moved from extreme poverty to income-generating activities, it will help decrease population growth”, he added.
Situation in Ghana
In Ghana, he said, the population in Accra would double in the next 35 years if nothing was done about it.
He added that a high fertility rate coupled with the migration of people from the rural centres to Accra for greener pastures had become the bane of the city.
He called on the government to provide good roads backed by social amenities, including jobs in rural communities, so as to entice people to stay in the rural areas.
He also called on the government to look at the area of sanitation, saying that must improve, for the country to have a healthy population.
Contribution of INDEPTH
Prof. Rosling commended the INDEPTH Network for its role in generating timely data on the health needs of people in deprived communities.
He said for research to be relevant “don’t just do data collection but ensure that the data are relevant to policy makers”.
The Executive Director of the INDEPTH Network, Prof. Osman Sankoh, briefing the professor on the work of the network, said its aim was to be a leader in data sharing in Africa and Asia.
He appealed to Prof. Rosling to use his influence to help increase the discoverability and visualisation of the INDEPTH Data, which is an online, free access archive of the network’s data for researchers, on its repository and the INDEPTH Stats, which is a yearly display of health and demographic indicators from the network for researchers, government officials and policy makers.
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He also called for support from international donors to help in raising funds for the INDEPTH Endowment Fund, which would be used in assisting developing partners.
Writer's email: rebecca.quaicoe-duho@graphic.com.gh