particular traditional health practices, and on the importance
of referral to modern health services. The Foundation's program
then expanded to support a wide array of women's and other
nongovernmental organizations addressing the underlying factors
contributing to VVF.
In July 1990,
a national VVF Workshop, under the patronage of the Emir of Kano,
brought together all the organizations working on VVF in Nigeria.
The result was the launching of a National Task Force on VVF. Led
by a Muslim women's leader, the task force, which is now
coordinating VVF activities nationally, includes some of Nigeria's
most influential health professionals, intellectuals, community
development workers, lawyers, social scientists, and
representatives of government, the media, and women's
organizations.
Recently,
Nigeria's Ministry of Health began working with the Ministry of
Justice to review government policy on a legal minimum age for
marriage. The task force has also promoted understanding of VVF
through extensive coverage in newspapers and on radio and domestic
and foreign television.
The Nigeria
program is instructive because it focuses on a serious problem
Nigerian women themselves brought to public attention, and because
it helped mobilize diverse groups within Nigeria to deal with
social, economic, and health concerns that affect reproductive
health and fertility.
Indonesia
The national
family-planning program in Indonesia is often cited as among the
world's most successful, and by some measures it is. Half the
country's 50 million women of childbearing age now practice
contraception, up from 8 percent when the National Family Planning
Coordinating Board (BKKBN) was created in 1970. In little more than
a single generation, population growth has slowed from 2.4 percent
to 1.6 percent annually.
Yet, despite
this numerical success, Indonesia's population is likely to swell
from 180 million to nearly 280 million in the next 50 years,
raising questions about the availability of food, water, housing,
jobs, schools, and health services. There is cause for more
immediate concern, as well. Each year roughly 22,000 women die
during pregnancy or childbirth—proportionally more than in
any other nation in Southeast Asia—due in part to unsafe and
illegal abortions. Indonesia also is witnessing a rising incidence
of premarital teenage pregnancies, reproductive tract disorders,
and such sexually transmitted diseases as HIV/AIDS and hepatitis
B.
For more than
two decades, Indonesian family-planning programs sought to curb
population growth by convincing increasing numbers of women (often
called