Reproductive Health
There is an inherent link between poverty, family structure and population. Large families are often more vulnerable to poverty, yet in many cultures it is desirable to have many children.
“I have to spend so much more time than before, walking to find firewood for cooking.” Another says “my land no longer yields the amount of food it used to.” These are examples of the problems community members raise in meetings that IIRR-trained facilitators convene and guide. These gatherings involve both women and men as well as young and old in a wide-ranging search for the underlying causes of their communities’ declining sustainability.
What often happens as the meetings progress is that they begin to see for themselves that the reasons for their inability to maintain their way of life are related to the increase in numbers of people living in their community. After more discussion of possible explanations they inevitably come to realize that the long-range solution involves family planning. This has proven to be a more effective method of limiting population growth than programs which focus on the size of families and that use outside facilitators. It succeeds so well because it achieves widespread community support of the benefits of family planning before any mention is made of contraceptives.
This concept—Learning Our Way Out (LOWO)—transforms family planning and contraceptive use from the actions of a few individuals to a community-wide concern and achievement. It creates fundamental change in behavior by allowing all members of a village or district to come to their own conclusion that smaller family size is closely linked to their community’s survival.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funded a trial of the LOWO concept in 2001 in southern Ethiopia where cultural and religious traditions were such that family planning was rarely practiced. The LOWO concept provided people there with an opportunity to air their concerns and make their own decisions about how best to limit growth and sustain their community.
Through LOWO, IIRR works hand-in-hand with men and women in rural communities in Ethiopia to help them identify practices that may lead to large families, and to increase awareness of the link between family size and poverty thus generating self-directed behavior change. While the Gates-funded project ended in 2005, beneficiary communities have adapted the project methodology and made it their own, applying the technique of community dialogue to combat self-identified harmful traditional practices, such as female genital mutilation, polygamy and wife inheritance.
Read here to learn more about how LOWO changed the life of one participant, Tseganesh Tulicha, for the better.
