Million Dollar Baby

Managerial Economics B-099

ENC320

Mr. Charles Cannon

March 3rd, 2014

FAMILY PLANNING: ACHIEVING ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT​2

Rapid population growth in developing countries is hampering the growth of Africa generally as a continent. Hampering growth in the sense that we can’t expect that the improvement of infrastructure will match the rate at which population is expanding. Therefore, a focus on family planning becomes even more essential. Any investment that into creating a structure that would aid family planning will always yield fruitful results that far outweigh the costs. This lends credence to why family planning should to be at the center of every discussion that concerns development. Apart from the fact that family planning is cost effective, it relieves population pressures, enhancing economic growth and development.

Family planning will always remain a smart investment, looking critically at Ethiopia’s for instance, an African country that has made tangible and measurable impact in increasing women’s access to family planning education and materials. Additionally it improves their ability to meet other Millennium Development Goals target like universal primary education, reducing child mortality, improving maternal health, ensuring environmental sustainability and also combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other communicable diseases. The Ethiopian government has realized that satisfying the unmet need for family planning helps to fulfil the country’s national dream of alleviating poverty and also a reclassification as a middle-income economy. For Ethiopia, meeting unmet needs for family planning by 2015 would save the lives of approximately 13,000 mothers and more than a million children. That aside, this investment, will also yield a dividend that will generate $23 million savings in the education sector and also about $26 million in the water and sanitation sector.

Nations doing well with attaining the MDG targets to improving maternal health have begun...