The Global Family Planning Revolution : Three Decades of Population Policies and Programs
This volume helps fill the gap left from insufficiently archived details of family planning programs carried out in many developing countries from the 1950s through the 1980s of their operations, their commonalities, and their differences, with muc...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Publication |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
Washington, DC: World Bank
2012
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2007/01/8101084/global-family-planning-revolution-three-decades-population-policies-programs http://hdl.handle.net/10986/6788 |
| Summary: | This volume helps fill the gap left from
insufficiently archived details of family planning programs
carried out in many developing countries from the 1950s
through the 1980s of their operations, their commonalities,
and their differences, with much useful information and
informed analysis. The programs were complex undertakings in
difficult settings that had little prior experience to draw
upon. Not surprisingly, as the case studies described here
demonstrate, no single strategy was available that could be
employed across these diverse situations, and procedures
that were successful in one country did not necessarily
function well in another. The case studies also indicate
that developing a successful program was as much an art as a
science. The key ingredient was being able to distinguish
when a somewhat radical new approach was needed and when
only some fine-tuning was necessary. While not a focus of
this book, the family planning programs had several
important, indirect effects on the field of population
studies that merit attention as part of the record. First,
uncertainty about the programs' worth and how to
measure the extent of their success spurred a great deal of
research on the measuring and modeling of fertility and
contraceptive practice, on fecundity issues, on the effect
of marriage patterns on fertility, and on a host of related
topics. Second, the programs greatly advanced the science of
evaluation. Third, the programs led demographers to work
with specialists from many other disciplines, including
public health, economics, sociology, political science, and
psychology. Finally, the family planning efforts attracted
many new and talented people to the field of population
studies. The 23 case studies presented here were the
earliest national efforts to establish organized family
planning programs for entire populations. The resulting
chapters naturally vary in terms of their balance of
history, analysis, and personal reflections given the wide
diversity of national contexts and program types. The
study's overall conclusion is that, for the most part,
the family planning program "experiment" worked:
policy and program interventions contributed substantially
to the revolutionary rise of contraceptive use and to the
decline in fertility that has occurred in the developing
world in the past three decades. |
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