MUSLIM AND FAMILY PLANNING

Dhaka is a sea of humanity. People and more people keep bubbling out from all nooks and corners onto the streets. Battle against burgeoning mouths is the 24 x 7 concern of the tiny nation's planners. However, my latest visit in November 2008, provided some room for cheer. On the outskirts of the humongous city, a lot many women could be seen walking to the 400 and odd garment factories. Garments annually earn $ 5.5 billion to the national exchequer, almost three-fourths of the nation's export earnings. But the industry's impact on the social horizon is more pronounced. Employing lakhs of women, these factories have indirectly contributed to limiting of family size, increase in the age of marriage for women, stability to the family incomes and overall empowerment of women.

Bangladesh's effort to contain rise of population seems to be yielding results. And they stem not merely from economic empowerment of women. To a large extent, the dividends on population front came about by roping in religious clerics into promotion of birth control and reproductive empowerment.

Over the past three decades, Bangladesh has made impressive gains in indices related to population and family planning. The total fertility rate (TFR) declined from 6.3 births per woman in 1970-1975 to the current rate of 3.3, a decline of 48 per cent in just 35 years. However, on an average, rural women still deliver one more child (3.5) than the urban women do (2.5). The contraceptive prevalence rate (CPR) has increased six-fold, from 8 per cent in the mid-1970s to 54 per cent in 2000.

Of the currently married women, 54 per cent are using a contraceptive. The pill continues to be the most popular method, with 23 per cent of all currently married women choosing it. Other commonly used methods are injectibles (7.8%) and female sterilization (6.7%). Women who decide to undergo sterilization generally do so early in their reproductive life; more than one-third do so before age 25, and two-thirds do so before they reach the age of 30.

Bangladesh was one among the seven Islamic nations that decided to take help from religious clerics to popularize birth control under an UNFPA sponsored initiative. (Others being Pakistan, Iran, Indonesia, Turkey, Egypt and Nigeria.) The project was known as “Involvement of Religious Leaders in Human Resource Development”. It is being implemented by the Ministry of Religious Affairs, in collaboration with the Imam Training Academy, Bangladesh. Small groups of 130 religious leaders from communities are brought to the local units of the Academy to educate them about issues on various reproductive health, gender and family welfare topics.

The project, initiated in 1999, is aimed at involving religious leaders as advocates in facilitating behaviour change in their communities in order to create a supportive environment for improving reproductive health and to train at least 15,000 imams, 2,850 Hindu religious leaders and 420 Buddhist leaders on common set of issues and to increase the accessibility and utilization of reproductive health services.

Induction of imams neutralized the opposition from the religious clerics. But success has come mainly because women were recruited to propagate the message, something that countered the charges of Government propagating immorality. Today there are 25,000 women health workers who go out into villages with FP kits. Village women feel less inhibited addressing their concerns and worries to them.

Today the number of clerics trained for the purpose has far exceeded the target. "We should follow the reproductive health guidelines for safer births,” said Imam Nurul Islam at one such camp at Gazipur while talking to this scribe, in the outskirts of bustling Dhaka. Coming from a poor village just outside Khulna, Nurul is adamant about changing behaviour. “We need to be a beacon of change in our own communities.” Another Imam Abdur Rabb Mandal said: “One of the fundamental outcomes of this project is that we need to help ensure that women have safe births and healthy lives”. Curiously, a former imam i.e., Mohammed Abbas Uddin, is currently Deputy Director of the Family Planning Association of Bangladesh. He says, “We need to give proper care to mothers and children if they are to have healthy, productive futures.”

A passionate advocate for better reproductive health and family planning, Abbas is one of the trainers involved in the project. He is also a serious student of Islam. “I have no problem wearing two hats,” he says with a grin. “With my knowledge of the Quran and my work with the Family Planning Association, I am in a unique position to promote Family Planning in the country.”
Since the end of 2002, the project has exceeded its targets, training over 25,000 religious leaders throughout Bangladesh. They have been sensitized on a wide variety of health and social issues, including reproductive health and family planning, domestic violence, gender concerns, and the prevention of HIV/AIDS in the light of Islam. The initiative has fostered nothing less than a quiet revolution in Bangladesh.

However, the Family Planning programme is yet to take up several more issues. The age at first marriage in Bangladesh is still pretty low, although it is rising. The legal age of marriage for women has been increased from 14 to 18 years; the minimum for men is 21. In 2000, about half of country's women were married by the time they were 15, down from 60 per cent just three years before. More than 15 per cent of married women have an unmet need for family planning in Bangladesh, 8 per cent for spacing and 7.3 per cent for limiting births.