A US-based advocacy group has attacked the World Banks family planning lending programme which, it alleges, favours India and Bangladesh at the cost of other nations.
Since the 1970s, the two countries got a record $1 billion each for their population programmes, leaving out almost nothing for Africa where reproductive health is abysmal and fertility and population growth rates remain high, says a study by the Population Action International (PAI).
PAI policy director Shanti Conly, who released the report yesterday, commended the Banks role in India and Bangladesh but said it should not neglect other developing countries, especially in Africa and Latin America, where population explosion had begun to arrest economic development.
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The report also expresses concern at the decline in the Banks commitment to health, nutrition and population projects. The Banks lending for these projects in 1997 totalled $940 million, down from a peak of $2.3 billion in the previous year and $1.1 billion in 1995. According to preliminary estimates, Bank lending for population and reproductive health also declined in 1997 to a little over $230 million compared with over $500 million in 1996.
In 1997, the International Development Association (IDA), the Banks concessionary affiliate, also gave India a lions share of $248 million for a new reproductive and child health project as against a paltry sum of a $100 million to Argentina and $21.8 million to Paraguay, according to the PAI study which is based on interviews with Bank officials, including President James Wolfensohn.
The study says the Bank emphasises on economic and social development programmes such as girls education and micro-enterprise loans to women as a strategy for slowing population growth, ignoring recent research stressing the importance of organised family planning programmes to fertility decline.
The Banks bias towards long-term, indirect strategies is especially troublesome in the African context, where the unmet need for reproductive health services is high and timely action is urgently needed to avoid a doubling of population in the next two decades, Conly said. Such strategies, while important to raising the status of women, do nothing to help satisfy the unmet need for family planning among the more than 100 million women world-wide who want to avoid another pregnancy now, she added.
The study takes particular notice of what it calls the Banks neglect of links between population growth and development in its policy work and dialogue with governments; inadequacy of its financial support to reproductive health programmes and especially family planning and the lack of sufficient specialised staff in the Bank to advance policy work and programmes in these areas.
The reason for this, Conly said, the Bank is dominated by economists sceptical that demographic factors make a difference to development. Their scepticism flies in the face of a growing body of research showing the negative impact of population growth on economic development, especially in the poorest countries.
The PAI study offers a comprehensive set of recommendations for strengthening the Banks effectiveness in helping countries address population and reproductive health needs. They fall in three key areas population policy; project financing and support and experts as staff.
It says the Bank should establish a population unit to support the necessary analytical research to address the implications of rapid population growth across all areas of development. It suggests that the Bank restore and increase financial support for family planning, while increasing overall lending for reproductive health projects to at least $1 billion by the year 2000.
The Bank, it says, should appoint senior level staff with expertise in reproductive health, including family planning, to provide leadership on these issues within the Bank and within its regional departments, especially in Africa. The Bank itself has to undertake a stronger leadership role to make the small family norm a real success, it says.