It comes as little surprise that Kenya's efforts at becoming a newly industrialised country by 2030 are being undermined by a rapidly increasing population.
For starters, family planning has for more than two decades now been relegated to the periphery as global attention turned to combating the spread of HIV and Aids.
Only recently did the Global Fund, which supports programmes for malaria, Aids and tuberculosis, include reproductive health services among the initiatives it can finance.
While that has impacted on birth control initiatives in Kenya, individual responsibility for bringing forth only the number of children that a family can support has declined, especially among low income and rural communities, with the onset of an increasingly welfare leaning policies championed by President Kibaki's administration over the last ten years.
While access to free education constitutes a long term social investment, heavily subsidised health services have raised child survival rates tremendously, reducing the mortality rate while increasing the number of deliveries per mother.
Advocacy for smaller families has not been helped by political and religious leaders fervently urging their followers to bring forth more, albeit with different discernible motives.
The result is that the number of children per woman has just fallen from five to 4.6 over the last decade, compared to from eight to five in the previous one. In contrast, infant mortality has dropped from 77 deaths per 1,000 in 2003 to 52 deaths per thousand in 2009.
At these rates, the economy would need to grow by more than the 12 per cent floor set under the Vision 2030 blueprint.
These statistics underline the challenge facing Kenya in terms of providing social amenities while at the same time keeping the eye firmly focused on immediate developmental goals, particularly in the communications, energy and agricultural sectors.
Of urgent concern is the ticking time bomb of youth unemployment as school leavers increasingly find fewer and fewer opportunities in the job market; ending up in crime, early marriages and prostitution and feeding the cycle of high population growth and poverty.
To succeed in its goal of reducing the population growth rate from 2.9 per cent to the global average of 2.1 per cent, throwing money at awareness campaigns will not be enough.
Hard decisions such as restricting the number of children per household who can benefit from the welfare economy will have to be made.
Fiscal incentives to make family planning services cheaper and more accessible will also be required.
Getting cultural beliefs, religious dogma and political opportunism out of the way, however, would be the ultimate foundation for a sustainable birth control drive.
Source: http://allafrica.com/stories/201202150151.html
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