Lower your birth rate, Kenyan families urged

• Five children per woman is too much for the country to bear, they advise

Kenyan women are giving birth to an average of five children, creating a population boom that has distorted growth projections, according to a recent report.

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Now experts are warning that the high birth rate could precipitate a population crisis as available resources will not be able to support the growing number of people.

The increased birth rate is being attributed in part to years of neglect following a previously successful family planning campaign that had significantly reduced Kenya’s population growth in the 1980s and early 1990s.

According to the Population Council of Kenya, in conjunction with other agencies that deal with family planning, the consequences of the population boom that began in the late 1990s are already being felt with regard to government planning.

According to reliable statistics, Kenya’s population growth rate went from 1.53 per cent in 2000 to an estimated 2.758 per cent in 2008.

The report, released last month, also shows that the decline in family planning programmes across the country due to funding cuts is the main cause of increase in births.

The withdrawal of donor funding from government and private agencies family planning operations in the late 1990s may have resulted in an unexpected population boom.

“Every Kenyan knows it is the government’s duty to provide free basic education and free basic health care to its population, but we are just too many. This is a burden that the government might find hard to carry on its own,” said Walter Odhiambo, deputy country director of Marie Stopes Kenya, an NGO dealing with population and health.

Mr Odhiambo said a drastic reduction in the funding of family health projects by donor agencies is one of the main causes of the population increase.

The donors

“We know that the government is of good intentions. We know the division of family health is willing to educate the population on family planning. But the division doesn’t call the shots. The donors do,” he said.

In the late 1980s, family planning initiatives received more than Sh80 billion in donor aid in a year. By 2000, the amount of money coming in had dropped by more than 60 per cent to less than Sh32 billion.

At the height of its popularity two decades ago, the family planning initiative was credited with reducing the country’s fertility levels from eight children per woman to four.

At that time, all family health projections indicated that the number would decline further in subsequent years. But once the donor taps were closed, new projections had to be made.

According to reports, the decline in family planning programmes from the late 1990s resulted in the United Nations Population division revising Kenya’s projected population in 2050 from 44 million to 83 million.