Population control

Vision 2020 for Rwanda, a very detailed and in many ways highly ambitious plan, appears to accept that the struggle to control the population will not be won in the next few years. It forecasts that the population growth rate will show a meagre decrease from 2.9% in 2000 to 2.2% in 2020. Because of forecast drastic cuts in maternal mortality, infant mortality (1.07% to 0.5%) and a corresponding increase in life expectancy, the population is forecast to rise from 8.3 million to 11 million by 2010 and 14 million by 2020.
This is hardly surprising : the odds are stacked against population control. Tradition favours large families (and our experience is that women are often more keen on having a lot of children than men are). In addition, the country is largely Roman Catholic, at least nominally, while the second church, the Pentecostals, has the same view on artificial methods of birth control. This, in a country where half the population is under 18, means that the population is inevitably going to grow steeply at least in the next few years. Messages about limiting family size are hard to frame appropriately and are likely to fall on very stony ground. Their delivery is also impaired because they are largely created by a generation which has already produced large families and is therefore not a good role model. “Do what we say, not what we have done!”
The genocide provides a grim backdrop to this. So many people lost parents, children, siblings in that time of horror that small families must still seem very insecure and vulnerable.
Immigration will fuel this population growth : Rwanda is much safer than neighbouring eastern Congo and is much better organised than Burundi, while there are still returnees coming back from Tanzania and Uganda where they went into exile either before or during the genocide of 1994.
In several countries in Europe, Scotland included, the birth rate is now less than is required to sustain the population at its current level. It is hard to remember that this did not come about as a result of propaganda exercises by the government, but as a result of increasing prosperity and improving health care.
There are some signs of hope for limiting population growth here :
ß Increasing access to tertiary education is already delaying the age at which some young adults are ready to marry
ß It is not what any country would aspire to, but we have met several young men who have told us that they cannot get married because they are too poor. They usually express this in the traditional way of not having enough money to buy a cow.
ß There is a realisation among some, usually wealthy or well-educated, that having large families will now mean high costs of education as access to fee-paying secondary schools increases.
ß “Caisse sociale”, a scheme to pay pensions, should bring confidence at least to those in employment that they will have some income in their old age
In the meantime, I just cannot imagine how Rwanda can sustain 14 million people in such a small country.