Rajshahi slum dwellers becoming aware about family planning

FE Team | Published: April 07, 2015 00:00:00 | Updated: November 30, 2026 06:01:00

RAJSHAHI, Apr 6 (BSS): Success of building planned family in slum areas of the metropolis has started becoming visible by dint of diversified uplift initiatives taken by different government and non-government organizations.
According to sources concerned, the slum dwellers have realised the importance of building planned families with one or two children each for their solvency.
More than 2.5 lakh poor and slum people have come together for eradicating their long-lasting poverty and hunger under an anti-poverty project styled "Urban Partnership for Poverty Reduction Project (UPPRP)" in the city.
Side by side with uplifting their living and livelihood condition through diversified interventions of the project especially income-generation, many of the beneficiaries have become conscious about the family planning.
UPPRP Town Manager Mahbubul Alam told BSS that Local Government Engineering Department has been implementing the seven-year project with financial support from UNDP in association with UKaid and UNHabitat.
He said some development organisations concerned like Merry Stopes, Urban Primary Healthcare Project and Tilottoma have linkage with the project activities for expediting the family planning activities in the slums.
Dr AFM Anjuman Ara Begum, Chief Health Officer of Rajshahi City Corporation, said the family planning activities in the slum areas could be made successful through the project activities. In some slum families, population growth is going beyond control day by day for lack of necessary interventions by the concerned departments.
She says it will be difficult to control the population growth unless family planning programmes work well among the slum dwellers.
"We counsel only the pregnant mothers at different slums. Because of limitation of the city corporation, we can't provide birth control materials to the slum dwellers," she added.
Prof Mijan Uddin of Sociology Department and also vice-chancellor of Rajshahi University told the news agency that there are various reasons for the prevailing situation in slum areas.
The reasons include, poverty, strong desire to have male children, lack of awareness about excessive population, unavailability of contraceptive among slum dwellers and its high price, lack of counseling about family planning and polygamy.
When contacted, Dr Nasim Akhter, director of Department of Family Planning, said: "We conduct motivation programme twice a year in slum areas for population control".
She also said family planning workers provide birth control materials and counsel at the slums regularly, but shortage of manpower is a big obstacle to attain the expected goal.