Quality Education

“Unmet need for family planning”, which refers to the condition of wanting to avoid or postpone childbearing but not using any method of contraception, has been a core concept in international population for more than three decades (Casterline and Sinding, 2000; Freedman, 1987). The importance of the unmet need for family planning or satisfying an individual’s reproductive aspirations as a rationale for formulating population programmes was further explicitly reiterated by the Programme of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), which states that “Government goals for family planning should be defined in terms of unmet needs for information and services” and that “all countries should, over the next several years, assess the extent of national unmet need for good-quality family planning services (United Nations, 1994). ICPD+5 has called for a 50 per cent reduction in the unmet need for contraception by 2005 and its total reduction by 2015.

“Pregnancy is special, let’s keep it safe” was the theme for World Health Day in 1998. Even if agreement existed on the best way to ensure a safe pregnancy in a resource-poor setting, provision is only half the story; the level and nature of the demand for a “safe” pregnancy also needs evaluating. How women themselves perceive the dangers of pregnancy and how they react to those dangers are important questions to answer.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the total population of Bangladesh was less than 30 million. The annual growth rate of the population was less than 1 per cent until 1951, when the population reached about 44 million (Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics, 1998). From the early 1950s, mortality started to decline while fertility remained high until the 1970s. Owing to the changes in fertility and mortality rates, from the 1950s the population started to grow at an unprecedented rate, reaching an all-time high (about 2.5 per cent per year) in the 1960s and 1970s. The growth rate then started to decline in the 1980s and is currently about 1.5 per cent per year (figure 1). At the close of the twentieth century, the population of Bangladesh stood at about 130 million.

It is important to recognize that ... people must be central in development.

Since 1978, economic reforms have brought about dramatic increases in temporary migration.

An important distinguishing characteristic of mammals is that the female has mammae (breasts in human beings), the function of which is to secrete milk for the nourishment of newborn offspring. The availability of artificial means (bottles and formula milk) of feeding human infants has considerably reduced the dependency of infants on breast milk; however, the newborns of all other mammalian species remain exclusively dependent on mother’s milk for survival in early life. The milk produced by each species is particularly suited to the needs of newborns of that species. It is not surprising then that breast milk is the most suitable food for the human newborn.

Comparable household-level survey data for the same population at two times are essential for many types of analysis in which age, period and cohort effects must be distinguished. Until recently, it was rare to have usable micro-level data from developing countries collected at two times, far enough apart to allow for significant demographic change in the interim (Hermalin, Entwisle and Myers, 1985). The availability of data sets from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) for many of the same countries in which the World Fertility Survey was carried out has started to improve the situation greatly, enabling cross-national comparisons of changes over a decade or more for countries at different stages of the demographic transition. A growing number of countries have conducted a second DHS survey, and third surveys are planned in some countries, e.g. Indonesia.

Sri Lanka will have a rapidly ageing population, and this change will require substantial shifts in policies to cater for changing needs.

The concept "status of women" eludes precise definition and hence precise measurement. Status can be perceived in different ways: the extent of a woman’s access to social and material resources within the family, community and society (Dixon, 1978), or her authority or power within the family/community and the prestige commanded from those other members (Mukerjee, 1975), or her position in the social system distinguishable from, yet related to, other positions (Committee on the Status of Women in India, 1974), or the extent to which women have access to knowledge, economic resources and political power as well as the degree of autonomy they have in decision making and making personal choices at crucial points in their life-cycle (United Nations, 1975). The idea of status also connotes the notion of equality (Krishnaraj, 1986). There can be self-perceived status, group-perceived status or objective status (Mukerjee, 1975), a situation which can lead to status inconsistency when a person is very high in one type of status and very low in another.