The Chicken, The Egg & BBC

I was just watching the BBC Special - How Many People Can Live on Planet Earth. Which was made in 2009.

It talks about family planning and attempting to decrease birth rates for fear that we can't sustain the rate of population growth that is predicted. It's a doomsday tale of us not having enough food or enough water. It's terrifying.

But on a more constructive level it talks about the programs that are constantly talked about here in Rwanda - family planning. Giving people the choice to have a small family. Perhaps, more accurately, giving women the choice to have a small family. It has been proven that birth rates will naturally fall as quality of living improves. It seems a bit counterintuitive. After all, if you could guarantee your children a better life, wouldn't you want to have more children? Not so much. Most poor people are overcompensating. They are realistic about the fact that many of their children will die an early death. Therefore they have many children so they can remain with a couple.

So along with offering women birth control methods (birth control pills, implants in their arm that last five years and release hormones the same as the pill, etc), offering education has a great effect too. The more educated a woman is the longer she waits to get married, the longer she waits to have babies, and when she does, she will have less babies. Promoting female education is a great way to reduce population growth.

There are many efforts in Rwanda to decrease birth rates. Its estimated that the population is about 12 million at this moment. This country is overcrowded - there is no doubt about that. And the population is growing in leaps and bounds. The health services, schools and food production just can't keep up.

Like most things in Rwandan development, instead of choosing one way to get at the problem, they are doing twenty things at the same time. At times I see it as a spastic approach but other times I applaud them covering all the bases. So family planning is a big thing here. So is female education. So is raising the quality of life with electricity, hygiene, sanitation, water, food, etc. Instead of waiting for quality of life to increase and then birth rates to gradually decrease, they are attacking it from all angles. Are they trying to put the chicken before the egg? Will lower birth rates expedite raising the quality of living? are they trying to dupe logic? or will everything work out in simultaneous success?