ISLAMABAD – A two-day Population Summit 2015 will begin today on Thursday (5, Nov. 2015) at Jinnah Convention Center, Islamabad to discuss the issue of population and for chalking out a comprehensive policy with consultation of all stakeholders.
The Population Summit 2015 will be attended by about 500 delegates from across Pakistan and about 25-30 international participants.
All major political parties, religious leaders, provincial and federal leadership and civil society representatives are expected to attend the seminar to develop consensus for need to deal with high fertility and unbridled population growth and its harmful impact on individual health and societal well being.
The conference will also provide an opportunity to reaffirm our national and provincial pledges while through this summit, the government also intends to announce a change in the narrative used for explaining the population issue confronting Pakistan.
Apart from focusing on the political leadership, the summit will also bring forward the religious leadership’s final endorsement of how Pakistan has to accelerate its birth spacing/family planning efforts. The summit will also be an occasion to articulate a multiparty consensus on the issue; an opportunity to re-pledge for FP2020 goals at the national level (as a composite of the provincial FP2020 goals) and a national consensus statement on population and development.
Pakistan’s growing population issue becomes an ‘emergency’
Sharing the details of the summit with media earlier, Minister of State for Health Saira Afzal underlined the need to change the narrative of population planning and to view it in the context of health, given that high fertility and unbridled population growth is having a harmful impact on individual health and societal wellbeing in general and maternal and child health in particular.
Declaring population as an emergency, Saira conceded that the critical issue of population explosion in Pakistan has not been accorded the kind of attention that it merited. “It will now be an emergency, like any other disease,” she stated.
Pakistan’s population issues loom large in terms of the balance of 188 million with limited resources and rapid growth eroding development gains. Increasingly there is recognition that a slower pace of population growth would have huge development benefits especially in terms of the environment, maternal and child health and in poverty reduction.
Why Pakistan is lagging behind most regional and Muslim countries?
A key reason why Pakistan is lagging behind most regional and Muslim countries in terms of completing its demographic transition and improving its reproductive health and other MDGs has been wavering political commitment and unsustained support by successive governments. Unlike Bangladesh, a model success story, population has never been declared a national priority. A strong policy statement from the top leadership of this country would make up for lost time and reassure us of the commitment to tackle an important national and provincial issue with a strong consensus
Need to incorporate population issues into the Vision 2025
There is a new opportunity to highlight and incorporate population issues into the Vision 2025. With Human Capital as one of its pillars this framework will embody key strategies and trajectories to be followed for human development, health and population nationally and in the provinces.
There is a chance to further utilize the newly evolving SDGs, which have been signed by the Prime Minister of Pakistan in September 2015, and to bring about alignment with Population and Health and Growth strategies in the provinces. Given the 18th Amendment and devolution of the population and health sectors in the country, it is important, for the provinces to make their own commitments to this goal. A process has been followed to ensure ownership of these goals at the provincial levels and for the charting out individual of provincial health and population strategies. The provinces are in the process of developing their own provincial population policies.
