Quality Education

With the development of its family planning programme, China has achieved great success since the 1970s in slowing the growth of its population. This is evident in the rapid decline in fertility: the total fertility rate (TFR) declined from the 1960s average of 5.68 to 4.0 in the 1970s and to only 2.46 for the first eight years of the 1980s.

The article considers the relationship between migration from Central Asia to the Russian Federation and gender relations. In particular, the paper describes the age-sex composition of the migration flows from three countries of the subregion (Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan) and discusses the case of Kyrgyzstan with its active female migration. Male migrants are more often employed in construction and are paid more than female migrants, who work mostly in trade and services. However, men and women show almost no difference in complying with migration laws, vulnerability in interactions with the state, relations with employers and apartment owners as well as transnational practices. The article also considers possibilities for family reunification, and gendered differences in inter-ethnic communication. The article concludes that further studies are required, and that assistance mechanisms are required for women who do not receive financial assistance from their migrant husbands. The article also finds that migrants’ sexual and reproductive behaviour is characterized by limited access to information about risks and also requires thorough study.

This note presents the prevalence and duration of breast-feeding in Nepal and discusses some of the socio-demographic factors influencing breast-feeding as well as the determinants of breast-feeding.

A note by the ESCAP secretariat to the forty-seventh session of the Commission, which will be held at Seoul, Republic of Korea, from 1 to 10 April 1991, reviews a variety of topics related to population. These include a survey of the population situation in the region, including policies and programmes; the state of socio-economic development in the region and development issues closely linked with population, such as the status of women, quality of population, environment, poverty and rural-urban migration. It also considers various multidisciplinary strategies and programmes of the secretariat such as cross- disciplinary training, multidisciplinary research, technical advisory services and population information.

Despite the long history of the family planning programme in Bangladesh, the contraceptive prevalence level remains low and consequently the rate of population growth has remained persistently high. Several factors can be attributed to low contraceptive prevalence. The most important factors are low levels of socio-economic development, the lower status of women, the strong preference for sons, the high level of infant and child mortality and limited access to health and family planning facilities.

The present generally accepted theoretical approach to understanding fertility sees population and development as mutually interacting; that is, fertility affects development and development affects fertility as well. The effect of high fertility and rapid population growth on development goals has been well-understood since Coale and Hoover’s pioneering effort in 1958, but the notion that development programmes, other than family plannin programmes as such, affect fertility is a somewhat newer and more novel idea.

If rapid social changes result in changes in living arrangements, how will they affect the relations between generations?

After substantial efforts by population and family planning programmes, fertility in Nepal has begun to decline.

Living arrangements for the elderly of the future will not necessarily continue to be predominently with a child as coresident.

Policies that accept the wider mobility of the population are likely to accord with policies that will enhance the wellbeing of greater numbers of people.

Although population has been a part of development work for more than three decades and one most clearly affecting women, it is only during recent years that women’s concerns and their active involvement in the development process have received the attention due to the “other half’ of the world’s population.

The ESCAP region’s early attention to population ageing has built a strong foundation for future efforts that can give the region leadership in innovative programme development and the utilization of sound research

Replacement of cheap IUDs with more effective ones could significantly reduce China’s high contraceptive failure rate

Lactational amenorrhoea deserves careful consideration within the family planning programme.

Many clients lack correct and specific information about side-effects for the method they are using.

Migration, particularly undocumented migration, will become an issue of major political conflict.

A major outcome of the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) is the expansion of population programmes to include reproductive health services and strategies to raise the status of women (United Nations, 1994). Grassroots women’s organizations influenced the recommendations as well as the strategies for their implementation. In the pre-planning stages within countries and during the Conference itself, the Women’s Caucus, representing more than 400 organizations from 62 countries, stressed the important role that women’s empowerment plays in promoting acceptance and use of reproductive health services (Ashford, 1995). They argued that women who are empowered, that is, who have control over their lives and have skills in seeking information and using resources, are more likely to make their own reproductive decisions.

Son preference is commonly believed to be widespread in South Asia and in many developing countries, particularly where women are economically and socially dependent on men (Bairagi and Langsten, 1986; Arnold and Kuo, 1984; Cleland and others, 1983; Vlasoff, 1990). Analysing Demographic Health Survey data from 57 countries, Arnold (1997) showed that son preference remains strong in South Asian countries and, in that area, Bangladesh has the highest ratio of preference for sons over daughters. Sons are generally preferred over daughters owing to a complex interplay of economic and socio-cultural factors. Sons contribute more than daughters to family income, provide adequate support in old age to their parents, impose less of a financial burden and carry forward the family name (Nag, 1991; Ali, 1989). On the other hand, the birth of a daughter is seen as bringing neither ‘benefit” nor “prestige” to the family. Daughters are often considered as an economic liability because of the dowry system as well as the high cost of weddings. Once married, daughters become physically, as well as psychologically, isolated from their natal home and are seldom seen as making significant contributions to their natal family (Chowdhury, 1994). Thus, when the net utility of having a son outweighs that of having a daughter, parents are likely to prefer sons to daughters and may be reluctant to stop childbearing until their desired number of sons has been achieved.

Reproductive health care is being promoted as a way to address a range of women’s health needs as well as improve the quality of services provided for current family planning users. By reducing ill health and premature deaths, reproductive health care is considered a worthy investment in its own right. It also may encourage more women to adopt family planning and thereby lower fertility rates. Women in developing countries face a number of special health risks associated with sexuality and childbearing. According to the World Bank (1993), about one third of the total disease burden that women face is linked to pregnancy, childbirth, abortion and various reproductive tract disorders. Women are more susceptible to sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) including HIV than men (Aitken and Reichenbach, 1994) and can pass these on to their unborn children.

Few community-based studies in India have investigated the determinants of women’s self-reports of reproductive tract infections and other forms of gynaecological morbidity. One of the most striking findings to emerge from the few that have done so is the strong association between the use of female sterilization, or in some cases the intrauterine device (IUD), and reported or diagnosed gynaecological morbidity.

Policy makers will have to plan for megacities of a size and complexity never before seen in history.

The ESCAP region has undergone a substantial change in the growth and structure of the population over the past several decades. Several countries and areas of the ESCAP region have completed the demographic transition, reducing fertility and mortality to low levels, while in many others both fertility and mortality rates remain high. Levels of urbanization and growth of the urban population also vary across the region. This article examines the size, growth and distribution of the population and provides an overview of the patterns of urbanization and urban growth in the ESCAP region. It discusses new and emerging issues of demographic dynamics in the region, in areas such as the economic and social impact of ageing and international migration. Finally, it highlights the implications of the process of urbanization for promoting gender equality and equity, for sustainable development and for reducing the incidence of poverty.

Apart from effective legislation and its enforcement, suitable welfare schemes can facilitate increasing the age at marriage.

Migration, one of the three components of population change, has become an increasing focus of research and policy development in many third world countries. Internal and international movements exert varying degrees of influence on specific countries or regions, depending on a mix of political, social, economic and environmental factors. The internal movement of Solomon Islanders is more visible and increasingly far more important than external movements, which more often than not are for educational purposes. In the third world, internal migration is strongly associated with rural-to-urban drift. However, this process involves a number of different movement streams, characterized by varying patterns and processes associated with various socioeconomic factors in places of both origin and destination (Pryor, 1975).

Many countries are transforming their efforts to meet their population’s reproductive health needs by refocusing maternal and child health and family planning activities into more comprehensive reproductive health programmes. Clearly, the specific directions and magnitude of the changes involved should depend on the socio-economic context and local epidemiology of reproductive health problems, as well as on the current programmatic situation. In seeking to innovate and expand reproductive health services, programme managers and policy makers are generally advised to follow an approach that is (a) public health based - addressing key reproductive health problems, (b) pragmatic - adding interventions and services in an incremental manner and building on what already exists, and (c) participatory - recognizing what different actors can feasibly do (Fathalla, 1996). The need to identify appropriate service delivery models and subsequently scale-up successful efforts is acute.