Katelyn Forman

Kenya is one of the few countries that encourages its people to have less children. Recently, Kenya decided to enforce population policies in order to control the increased growth in the country. In 2012, Kenya enforced their policy which “[aimed] to reduce the number of children a woman has over her lifetime from 5 in 2009 to 3 by 2030” (Population Reference Bureau, 2014). As per the graph, this policy clearly has had some success since the yearly population growth rate continued to lower after 2012.

In order to control the population growth, Kenya has created access to family planning services for both men and women. Along with this, the policy was supported by religious leaders and parliamentarians which actually allowed for the family planning policy to have an “increase of more than 10 percent over the previous year in resources” (Population Reference Bureau, 2014). Additionally, the country was able to increase contraception usage to 46% in 2009 right before the policy, compared to 27% in 1989. While contraception was not a part of the newest policy, it clearly helped the population growth before 2012 because the 1980’s began the decrease of the yearly population growth rate. It is extremely difficult to control population growth because, as the article mentions, “reproductive health is a human right” (Population Reference Bureau, 2014) and people should have control over when to have children or not. This meaning that direct governmental intervention on a family’s size would not be a popular policy because developing a family is a natural part of life.

However, what Kenya is doing does seem like an effective method because their government is not only supplying its people with information on contraception, but it is also providing assistance with family planning. With family planning, people could theoretically calculate how many children they should have based on their financial status. This would benefit the parents because they would not be struggling to provide for a large family, benefit the child because they would hopefully not be raised in a struggling home, and benefit Kenya by limiting the number of children each household has. Lastly, contraception factors into this scenario as well because after having 1 or 2 children, based on family planning, a woman could go on birth control to limit her chances of having another child. This overall helps control the population growth and ensures that the growth rate continues to lower each year.

Work Cited:

“New Kenyan Population Policy a Model for Other Countries.” Population Reference Bureau, 4 Mar. 2014, www.prb.org/kenyan-population-policy/.