Family Planning Programme Effort in South Asia

Abstract

All five countries of South Asia, containing over one-fourth of the developing world's population, increased the effort levels of their national family planning programs over the 17 years from 2 to 1989. However, 30 measures of effort show much disparity among the five in the amount increase and in variability across the kinds of effort. The higher the overall effort, score the less variability, and the better the scores for service arrangements and for the availability of contraceptive methods. All these results parallel differences among the countries in rising contraceptive use and in fertility decline. 'The five countries also differ sharply in their likelihood of reaching replacement fertility by the Year 2015. A variety of predictive indicators, combined a single composite index, suggest that only Sri Lanka is certain to reach that goal, that only is "probable" to do so, that Bangladesh is 'possible,' and that Nepal and Pakistan are unlikely.' The actual outcomes will reflect both the degree of program effort and the pace of modernization; in any case very large increments to population size are built into the age the vast body of family planning research there c few attempts to measure program inputs dependently of program outputs.