LAHORE, July 10: As Pakistan is struggling to bring down the population growth rate from existing 2.1 per cent to 1.9 per cent by July next year, the world observes World Population Day today. This year’s theme is “reducing poverty — improving reproductive health”.

The population growth rate in the Punjab, however, still stands at 2.6 per cent. According to available statistics, the Punjab’s population is 79.8 million, which is 57 per cent of the country’s total 144.2 million.

To bring down the population growth rate and stabilize other health and development indicators, the federal government has devolved the population welfare department to provincial governments from July 1.

After the devolution, the Punjab population welfare department is supposed to devolve its activities at districts level by the end of this financial year and reduce population growth rate to 1.8 per cent by 2004, 1.6 per cent by 2012 and 1.3 per cent by 2020.

Besides controlling the growth rate, the Punjab population welfare department is also required to increase contraceptive prevalence rate from existing 30 per cent to 43 per cent by 2004 and 57 per cent by 2012. Similarly, the coverage rate should be increased form existing 65 per cent to 74 per cent and cent per cent by the respective target years.

Meanwhile, the UNFPA has also devolved its setup at the provincial level as Provincial Support Team (PST) to assist the Punjab government in its population and health programmes. The UNFPA’s PST will also provide technical support to provincial and district health teams, facilitate implementation and monitoring of UNFPA projects in the province and develop networking and liaison at the federal, provincial and district levels.

Talking to Dawn, UNFPA’s provincial programme officer Dr Nuzhat Rafique said the UNFPA is working to help ensure universal access to reproductive health including family planning and sexual health to all couples and individuals. It is also working to support population and development strategies that enable capacity-building in population programming and to promote awareness of population and development issues and to advocate for the mobilization of the resources and political will necessary to accomplish its areas of work.

Dr Nuzhat said the UNFPA was also collaborating with the Punjab population welfare and health departments to improve reproductive health services in rural areas and hard-to-reach areas in Chakwal and Muzaffargarh districts. She said the UNFPA was also working to improve family welfare centres, upgrade mobile service units as well as promoting interventions for safe motherhood and advocacy for family planning and reproductive health.

Meanwhile, UNFPA executive director Thoraya Ahmed Obaid in her message on world population day said the men and women stuck in extreme poverty lack real choices, opportunities and basic services to improve their situations. Due to inequality and discrimination, women suffer the most.

She said one forth of all women in developing countries were adversely affected at some point in their lives by a lack of a proper maternal healthcare. She said every minute one woman dies during pregnancy and birth because she did not receive adequate care. “This amounts to deadly neglect. By increasing interventions for safe motherhood especially emergency obstetric care, Ms Obaid said lives of half-a-million women and seven million infants could be saved besides preventing millions of women from suffering from infections, injury and disability each year.”

Ms Obaid said it was high time to step up efforts for family planning. She said that around 350 million couples still did not have access to a range of effective and affordable family planning services and demand for these services was expected to increase by a further 40 per cent in next 15 years.

The war against poverty would not be won unless more and more resources would be directed towards women and reproductive health, she added.