Population growth PNG’s biggest challenge

CONTINUOUS and increased investment must be a priority of the PNG Government and its stakeholders if it wants to reach the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) targets.
Some of the goals include fewer unwanted pregnancies, reducing maternal and child mortality, morbidity and malnutrition, improved employment opportunities for women, educational attainment and economic gains.
In order to achieve that, the PNG Government and its stakeholders should invest in family planning.
And it is timely to touch on the issue of family planning (which can be sensitive in PNG) now after we celebrated World Population Day yesterday, with the theme: Family Planning is a human right.
Only 32.4% of married women in PNG use contraception and that is one of the lowest rates among married women in member states of the World Health Organisation (WHO) in the Western Pacific region. And one of the challenges is addressing the unmet need of family planning.
A study by WHO in PNG titled “Actions for scaling up long-acting reversible contraception”, says fewer unwanted pregnancies reduce maternal and child mortality, morbidity and malnutrition, and improves employment opportunities for women, educational attainment and economic gains.
The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that everyone has the right to health and wellbeing, and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) considers access to family planning a fundamental human right.
Investments in family planning today are investments in the health and wellbeing of millions of women for generations to come.
There is an international consensus that individuals and couples have a right to control their reproductive decisions, including family size and the timing of births. But surveys in many developing countries reveal substantial deficiencies in access to family planning.
Up to a quarter of women want to either stop childbearing altogether or delay the arrival of their next child, but many lack access to contraception.
Some who want to avoid pregnancy are not using safe and effective family planning methods, for reasons ranging from lack of access to information or services to lack of support from their partners or communities.
It has been predicted that unless we manage to bring down our fertility rate, we may not be able to meet our development targets.
The blame for this problem lies largely on our woeful state of family planning, with people reluctant to take adequate measures for fear of social stigma, religious taboos, and misinformation that circulates about contraception.
But at the heart of the matter is the fact that most women are still not empowered enough to make the right decisions, and hence rush into having families too early in life.
In PNG, compared to developing nations, women have children too early, which means new generations are born within shorter spans of time, causing the population of our country to grow faster.
Women often choose this path because they simply have no other choice.
The solution lies in empowering and educating women; women with greater control over their lives can make better informed decisions on when to have children, and also have greater say in the decision-making at family level.
In that regard, several different lines of action should be taken to empower women for maximum effectiveness.
Awareness programmes need to be ramped up, and women in remote areas with little knowledge of birth control need to be reached.
Having a child is the most intimate, personal and permanent decision a person can make. In a nation built on freedom, such decisions should be left to the individual.
UNFPA is now calling on all governments, including PNG, to fulfill their commitments to ensure universal access to sexual and reproductive healthcare and reproductive rights, including family planning services and information, as agreed at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development and in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
Controlling the population is, without a doubt, one of the greatest challenges facing PNG today.