posted
Small family The Egyptian Gazette Online Sunday, November 7, 2010 12:56:04 PM
Minister of Family and Population Mushira Khatab has declared that the decades-long birth control campaign yielded poor fruits, regardless of billions of Egyptian pounds spent in persuading the Egyptian couples to have less number of children.
The minister made her disappointing and expensive confession when she commissioned a new programme planned to convince the Egyptian family to have no more than two children. Since 1960s, successive Egyptian governments have been battling against the ever-increasing population, which allegedly consumed the nation’s resources and disrupted economic development programmes. The campaign was intensified more powerfully than before in the 1970s after foreign donors sympathising with the Government agreed to finance the birth control campaign, which based its hope on the use of free contraceptives. Although a high-profile campaign unfolded on television, in newspapers, in posters and on large-size billboards in the street, the Egyptian couples, especially in the Delta and Upper Egyptian areas has made a lukewarm response. Nor have their economic hardships persuaded them to reconsider their small homes being overcrowded with a big number of children. The population increase in this region has also led to an alarming increase in the number of school drop-outs and the growing community of child labour to help their poor families. Latest estimates said that Upper Egypt is responsible alone for no less than 40 per cent increase in the annual population in Egypt. Therefore, the Minister of Family and Population has decided that her pilot plan should be launched in Upper Egypt before it (the plan) will be echoing elsewhere in the Delta. But without offering good incentives, materially and financially, to poor Upper Egyptian families, they would not respond to Khatab’s appeals positively.
I really don't understand how the "Birth Control Campaign" failed.
While the "campaign" started decades ago I don't know what the TFR (Total Fertility Rate) the campaign was geared toward.
Obviously this is a minister who instead of giving the Egyptian people credit for moving forward, she'd rather drastic strip the ministry of its budget and take credit for the cost savings.
She might be credited several decades down the road for destroying Egypt's vast reduction of its TFR.
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