DHAKA: Bangladesh is furiously drawing up plans to redeploy family planning workers at the field level in an effort to get crucial demographic numbers swinging downwards once again.

The country’s population growth rate is down to 1.5 per cent per year from 3 per cent three decades ago, but it is the total fertility rate that has planners and demographers worried. That number — 3.3 per woman — has not budged since 1994.

Bangladesh, whose population of 140 million makes it the eighth most populous country in the world, is adding 2.5 million to its numbers every year. That is despite the fact that the contraceptive prevalence rate now standing at 54 per cent — in 1975 it was just 7 per cent.

Yet the use of contraceptives is unbalanced between the genders — only 10 per cent of those who use them are estimated to be male.

Dr Ahmed Al Sabir, research director of the National Institute of Population Research and Training, attributed the low use of contraceptives by men to poor campaigning by family planning workers. “There are flaws in our field-level network,” he said.

Indeed, Health Secretary M Fazlur Rahman said, “The present population growth following the withdrawal of a large number of family planning workers from the field is now a matter of serious concern.”

Dr Ferdousi of Dhaka Medical College Hospital would like to see the population growth rate hit 1.2 per cent by 2005 and the total fertility rate brought down to just above two per cent by the same year. For this to be achieved, she said a “strong political will is a must”.

Some of that urgency is now being reflected in the new drive to reach out in rural Bangladesh and take the message home to men.

Since its inception, family planning programme has aimed at motivating women to use contraception. Women health workers were recruited to visit women in their homes, but reaching out to men was largely ignored.

It did not help in 1998 when the family planning programme was integrated with health under the Health and People Sector Programme, leading to the withdrawal of 45,000 field-level family planning workers.

The momentum of delivering the message to the grassroots was then lost.

There was a time when women were excommunicated and barred from attending social functions for having adopting family planning methods.

A UN scenario now projects that Bangladesh will achieve replacement-level fertility around 2025, provided the total fertility rate reaches 2.1 per cent.—Dawn/The InterPress News Service.