Abstract
Family planning represents a ‘best buy’ in global efforts to achieve sustainable development and attain improvements in sexual and reproductive health. Ensuring access is amongst key transformative strategies that underpin health and sustainable development. It confers fertility choices on women and couples within a human rights framework. By meeting contraceptive needs of all women, significant public health impact and development gains accrue. At the same time, governments face the complex challenge of allocating finite resources to competing priorities, each of which presents known and unknown challenges and opportunities. As such, there is a need to carefully consider the estimated costs and benefits for each proposed investment in health, education, social welfare, and security. Zambia has experienced a slow but steady increase in contraceptive prevalence, with slight decline in total fertility rate (TFR), over the past 20 years. Increasing voluntary modern contraceptive use among women offers opportunities to reduce unintended pregnancy while effectively harnessing the demographic dividend in order to bolster socioeconomic outcomes for households and communities. Drawing from the Zambian context, we present a case for making investments in voluntary family planning (FP), underpinned by a human rights framework, as a pillar for accelerating development and socio-economic advancement. Through multilevel interventions aimed at averting unintended pregnancies, Zambia – and other low- and middle-income countries – can reduce their age dependency ratios and harness economic growth opportunities awarded by the demographic dividend while improving the health and quality of life of the population.
Funder
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Subject
Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health,Health Policy,Immunology and Microbiology (miscellaneous),Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology (miscellaneous),Medicine (miscellaneous)
Reference24 articles.
1. Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development,2015
2. Adding It Up: Investing in Contraception and Maternal and Newborn Health, 2017—Supplementary Tables;J Darroch,2017
3. Development: Slow down population growth.;J Bongaarts;Nature.,2016
4. Fifty Years of Family Planning: New Evidence on the Long-Run Effects of Increasing Access to Contraception.;M Bailey;Brookings Pap Econ Act.,2013
5. The economic consequences of reproductive health and family planning.;D Canning;Lancet.,2012
Cited by
2 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献