UNFPA and the Eastern Highlands PHA, launched the second Situation Analysis Report on the Population Growth in the province in Goroka recently.
During the pre-launch conference held at the Paradise Hotel, UNFPA Country Representative, Marielle Sanders said the situation analysis repot was about family planning. Family planning is one of the corner stones of the government’s population policy.
She said the most important thing for all stakeholders is being able to speak clearly about the need for family planning and protection against unwanted pregnancies and disease.
“If we don’t do this now as we’ve heard in the morning young people will not only have to live with the consequences, climate change and how that will affect their livelihoods, they will also have to deal with rapid population growth, and therefore they might have less opportunity to participate in the economic development on the country. And if we don’t join forces to ensure access to quality sexual productive health and family planning services, the impact will be felt both among the young and old as more girls continue to get pregnant and more women continue to die from cervical cancer and other preventable diseases,” Sanders said.
The Provincial Health Authority CEO, Dr. Joe Apa said the Situation Analysis Report is a very important document for the province in planning for their population.
He thanked the UNFPA for their assistance in launching the Situational Analysis which is the second in the country. The first being the Milne Bay Situational Analysis report.
Ok now the growth rate of the province is 3.6 ok in another 10 years we might like to bring it down to 3 or another 20 years we might like to bring it down to 2.6 or something. We put a target, all of us work together and mobilize the resources and then going forward, and then we can get support these things.
Apa said one of the root causes of the many communicable disease, water and sanitation so if that is addressed, some of the infection will drop. Furthermore, lack of family planning is a root cause for many social problems in the province.
“Unplanned people, unplanned families, there’s so many of them so then we have population explosion, they come with different needs, and that also cause problems so that’s why we have so many social problems so we need to organize ourselves and we need to plan our family way back to the root causes and then attend them so that next 10-20-30 years we’ll have a good planned population and then this population can help develop the province” Dr. Apa said.
