Population Planning in Pakistan: Issues in Implementation and its Impact

It is over three decades now that we have official family planning programme in Pakistan. However, because of the absence of a coherent approach to overcome the social and cultural obstacles to the use of family planning in conjunction with poor service delivery and outreach activities; ineffective information, education and communication campaign; frequent changes in the organisational set up of the programme; inefficient management and lack of political commitment to family planning, the programme failed to achieve tangible success. Nevertheless, recent demographic and fertility surveys indicated some positive changes in the demographic indicators. This suggest that the population programme may be in the right direction. In order to accelerate the pace of these changes, intensive and concerted efforts are needed.