Bill Ryerson, currently in Nigeria working to plan a PMC program there, sent me the link to this highly relevant story. At roughly 170 million (currently) in its population size, Nigeria now accounts for about 2.4% of global population. See: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/world/africa/in-nigeria-a-preview-of-an-overcrowded-planet.html?_r=2&ref=todayspaper

Nigeria Tested by Rapid Rise in Population

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL Published: April 14, 2012

LAGOS, Nigeria – In a quarter-century, at the rate Nigeria is growing, 300 million people – a population about as big as that of the present-day United States – will live in a country the size of Arizona and New Mexico. In this commercial hub, where the area’s population has by some estimates nearly doubled over 15 years to 21 million, living standards for many are falling.

Lifelong residents like Peju Taofika and her three granddaughters inhabit a room in a typical apartment block known as a “Face Me, Face You” because whole families squeeze into 7-by-11-foot rooms along a narrow corridor. Up to 50 people share a kitchen, toilet and sink – though the pipes in the neighborhood often no longer carry water.

At Alapere Primary School, more than 100 students cram into most classrooms, two to a desk.

As graduates pour out of high schools and universities, Nigeria’s unemployment rate is nearly 50 percent for people in urban areas ages 15 to 24 – driving crime and discontent.

The growing upper-middle class also feels the squeeze, as commutes from even nearby suburbs can run two to three hours.

Last October, the United Nations announced the global population had breached seven billion and would expand rapidly for decades, taxing natural resources if countries cannot better manage the growth.

Nearly all of the increase is in sub-Saharan Africa, where the population rise far outstrips economic expansion. Of the roughly 20 countries where women average more than five children, almost all are in the region.

Elsewhere in the developing world, in Asia and Latin America, fertility rates have fallen sharply in recent generations and now resemble those in the United States – just above two children per woman. That transformation was driven in each country by a mix of educational and employment opportunities for women, access to contraception, urbanization and an evolving middle class. Whether similar forces will defuse the population bomb in sub-Sarahan Africa is unclear.

“The pace of growth in Africa is unlike anything else ever in history and a critical problem,” said Joel E. Cohen, a professor of population at Rockefeller University in New York City. “What is effective in the context of these countries may not be what worked in Latin America or Kerala or Bangladesh.”

Across sub-Saharan Africa, alarmed governments have begun to act, often reversing longstanding policies that encouraged or accepted large families. Nigeria made contraceptives free last year, and officials are promoting smaller families as a key to economic salvation, holding up the financial gains in nations like Thailand as inspiration.

Nigeria, already the world’s sixth most populous nation with 167 million people, is a crucial test case, since its success or failure at bringing down birthrates will have outsize influence on the world’s population. If this large nation rich with oil cannot control its growth, what hope is there for the many smaller, poorer countries?

“Population is key,” said Peter Ogunjuyigbe, a demographer at Obafemi Awolowo University in the small central city of Ile-Ife. “If you don’t take care of population, schools can’t cope, hospitals can’t cope, there’s not enough housing – there’s nothing you can do to have economic development.”

To read the full article, please click here: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/world/africa/in-nigeria-a-preview-of-an-overcrowded-planet.html?_r=2&ref=todayspaper

Many thanks to Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura for the attached article in the June 2009 issue of The Psychologist. The article describes the work of Population Media Center. Dr. Bandura is a member of PMC’s Program Advisory Board.

Social Cognitive Theory Goes Global (PDF, 92 KB)

http://www.thepsychologist.org.uk

Opposition to contraception is hurting the Philippines. Each year, more than half of the 3.4 million pregnancies in the country are unplanned, resulting in high costs to women, their families and the national health care system. In addition, this very high rate of unintended pregnancy is impeding the Philippine’s development goals.

Yet this is not an epidemic for which there is no known solution. Unintended pregnancies are highly preventable if women have access to voluntary family planning information and services, particularly modern methods of contraception.

For full article, visit:
http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/views-and-analysis

Ask 46-year-old Erlinda Cristobal (real name concealed by request) how many children she has.
“Ten,” she said.

“But I was supposed to have only six,” she snapped in a breath.

After the sixth pregnancy, Cristobal decided that she and her husband, a casual laborer who earns an average of four dollars a day, should not have any more children.

“My husband doesn’t have a stable job. There are days when we don’t eat so that our children can,” she told Xinhua in an interview near her residence in Manila.

For full article, visit:
http://www.philstar.com/Article.aspx?articleId=461829&publicationSubCategoryId=200

PMC was recently featured in Earth Island Journal
http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/eij/article/sex_sells/

Sex Sells: A Tiny Nonprofit Uses Mass Media to Encourage Family Planning

Fikrite is a girl in trouble. Her grandfather has just died and now a neighbor, a man named Damte, has taken over the house and is trying to turn the place into a bar and brothel. Fikrite says she won’t allow it, so Damte starts spreading rumors about the girl and soon everyone, including her boyfriend, thinks that she is hiding a child born out of wedlock. Damte then seduces Fikrite’s stepsister, Lamrot, gets her hooked on booze and drugs, and knocks her up. When Lamrot tries to abort the pregnancy, she almost bleeds to death and lands in the hospital, where she finds out that she is HIV-positive.

If this sounds like overcooked melodrama – well, that’s the point. The story comes from “Yeken Kignit” (“Looking Over One’s Life”), a radio soap opera that gripped much of Ethiopia for 257 episodes beginning in 2002. The show had all of the elements that make serial dramas popular: sex, romance, mischief, betrayal, suspense. But the wildly successful program – which reached more than one half of Ethiopian adults during its two-year run and sparked a craze for naming baby girls Fikrite – wasn’t designed just for entertainment. Produced by a small US organization called the Population Media Center (PMC), the show was written with the express purpose of encouraging family planning, women’s empowerment, and HIV/AIDS awareness. Not all the listeners knew this, however, and that was also the point.
Read the rest of this entry »

Population Media Center’s Talk Show Project is generating many requests for interviews on population issues. You can listen over the air or online to the following programs. Please forward this list to your friends and colleagues as well. All times given are Eastern Time (US). Engaging and educating the public, opinion leaders and decision makers is crucial for sustainable population advocates.
Read the rest of this entry »

Population Media Center founder William Ryerson appears on Full Power Living (www.emotionalpro.com) April 30, 2009 discussing the size population that is sustainable on our earth. Listen & Call 800-630-7858.

While we’re busy looking at the effects of global warming, we’ve taken our eye off the “population issue.” Yet every day 225,000 humans are added to the earth, 80 million new people every year! The UN projects that global human population will surpass 9.2 billion by the year 2050. Many sustainability advocates are wondering why educators, politicians, and the mainstream media are having a bad case of “population amnesia,” as they fail to consider how food, water, housing, jobs and education can be made available to an additional 3 billion people in a mere 40 years. William Ryerson has some considerations for us on this topic! Tune to Full Power Living (www.emotionalpro.com), April 30, 9 a.m. PST.

Thanks to Toby Aykroyd for this article.
—————————–

There are already too many people living on Planet Earth, according to one of most influential science advisors in the US government.

Nina Fedoroff told the BBC One Planet programme that humans had exceeded the Earth’s “limits of sustainability”. Dr Fedoroff has been the science and technology advisor to the US secretary of state since 2007, initially working with Condoleezza Rice. Under the new Obama administration, she now advises Hillary Clinton. “We need to continue to decrease the growth rate of the global population; the planet can’t support many more people,” Dr Fedoroff said, stressing the need for humans to become much better at managing “wild lands”, and in particular water supplies. Pressed on whether she thought the world population was simply too high, Dr Fedoroff replied: “There are probably already too many people on the planet.”

For full article, visit:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7974995.stm

PMC was recently featured in an issue of The Bridge (a weekly newspaper based in Montpelier, Vermont). PMC was highlighted in their ‘Speaking Out’ supplement that dealt with the sometimes overlooked public issue, population growth.

http://www.montpelierbridge.com/Population%20Insert.htm

I urge you to visit the links below and help shape the U.S. population debate unfolding on the pages of The New York Times. In fact there are two debates occurring simultaneously: one on population and one on immigration.

The New York Times is publishing a series of articles on the impact the latest wave of immigrants is having on American institutions, with the first article focusing on the challenges of educating new immigrants.
Read the rest of this entry »