KARACHI, Mar 20 (APP): The First Lady Begum Samina Alvi, on Monday, terming population explosion as one of the biggest challenges faced by Pakistan stated that if measures were not taken to control the population of the fifth most populous country in the world it would grow to 360 million by 2050.
The first lady, while addressing the opening session of Population Research Conference 2023 at the Institute of Business Management (IBM), said that rapid population growth creates demographic challenges like the urbanisation, densely populated cities and paucity of resources.
It worsens the situation further for people living below the poverty line and their access to proper education, food, shelter and health facilities ebbed away, she observed and suggested “The social and economic strain caused by overpopulation can be alleviated, in part, by investing in women’s empowerment and, in particular, girls’ education.”
Samina Alvi further mentioned that there was lack of awareness regarding contraceptive methods and women especially in the rural areas were unaware of it while in some parts of the country different reasons obstruct women’s access to contraceptive methods.
The first lady said that every year there were approximately 9 million pregnancies recorded in Pakistan and out of them fifty per cent were unintentional pregnancies which result into an increase in population, maternal mortality rate and infant mortality rate.
Samina Arif Alvi appreciated IBM for its work on such an important topic of population growth in Pakistan and said that it was wonderful that IBM was conducting research on topics like fertility planning, maternal and child health, population growth, climate change and social inclusion because it is need of the hour.
She also requested the administration to share the results of the research with relevant stakeholders so that adequate steps can be taken to solve this problem.
