DIFFICULTIES IN ASSESSING EFFECTIVENESS OF POPULATION POLICY

Evaluation of population policy is problematic. The reason is that one cannot have an experimental method to evaluate the implementation of policy. Population trends depend on the policy as well as on a multitude of other factors, such as the institutional context, economic conditions, culture, value of children, religious doctrines, autonomy, etc. For example, how can one separate the effect of family planning programme from the effect of modernization and development? Some other difficulties are:

• Lack of consensus regarding the major goals of the population policy

• Lack of adequate measurement of parameters of population system

• Lack of reliable data

• Conversion of statistics of family planning users into reduction in total fertility rate

• Lack of a clear theoretical understanding of population-development nexus and how the effect of policy be separated from the effect of development and modernization

• Lack of appreciation for monitoring and evaluation of population programmes

Lack of consensus regarding the major goals of the population policy is a serious problem. Therefore, even those governments that now have an officially stated policy have taken decades to arrive at the policy statement and get it approved by appropriate state bodies. Lack of data raises another level of problem. Economically less developed countries are also statistically less developed countries. They lack detailed data on family planning and population parameters. The available data may be incomplete or unreliable. Then there are technical problems too. How does one convert the data on the number of users of family planning methods into measures of the number of births averted and the percentage impact on the birth rate? For this, one needs:

• Reliable data on family planning users by method, age, sex and duration of use;

• Rate of continuation and discontinuation by age; and

• Effectiveness of the different methods included in the programme