Family Planning and Ethnocentrism

The issue of family planning programming can be a difficult one to discuss.  While the intent of organizations is almost always good, the common approach to such initiatives is usually far too oversimplified for such a complicated matter of culture.  When I use the term "family planning," I am referring to initiatives that attempt to reduce family size by promoting forms of birth control with the belief that smaller families put less of a financial strain on the family structure, allowing for a better quality of life.  The idea is that it's easier to maintain the well being of four children than it is of six.  Four children accrue less medical bills, require less food, need fewer school uniforms and books.  While this is a logical argument, it completely ignores the cultural beliefs and financial logic held by many in favor of large families, making these sorts of programs almost entirely ineffectual.


For starters, promoting a family size of five or six resonates very little with someone who plans to marry four or five wives, nor does it resonate with someone who plans to be one of four or five wives.  If this is a decision that an individual has made based on their cultural or religious beliefs, they are unlikely to change their mind simply because it is supposedly cheaper to do so.  We do not all share the same ideas about what constitutes a quality life, and we do not all see money as the chief indicator of our life's quality.  Not only does the financial logic of many family planning initiatives not apply to these families, it's offensive to these families-- ethnocentrism disguised as community development.

But culture and religion aside, many families have their own financial logic that favors a larger family size.  In rural sub-Saharan Africa there is no social security or retirement plan.  The majority of people are farmers.  They farm until they can no longer farm, and then their children farm for them.  So while a large number of children act as helping hands on the farm in their youth; they, more importantly, become the support system for their elderly parents once they are grown.  Sharing the labor and financial burden among six children is much easier for each individual child, than it is to share the same burden among four.

I am personally one of twenty-one children.  My father had four wives.  I have decided not to maintain this type of lifestyle, and I am sure many family planning proponents will claim me as a success story.  The truth is, however, my reasons for wanting one wife and fewer children have nothing to do with what I was taught about family planning and everything to do with my personal beliefs and current situation.  I think a general shift towards smaller family size is just the natural progression of a society that becomes more urban and more mechanized.  There is no need to teach it.  Even more importantly, there's no need to use valuable resources to teach it in the name of development.  Smaller families do not lead to development; they are a product of development for the reasons that I've mentioned.  It's important when doing development work that we do not misconstrue the phenomena of developed societies with the causes of undeveloped societies.  We risk wasting resources, and in this case, being cultural insensitive.

Development Versus Relief or My Mother Doesn't Like Shoes

Continuing with the subject of sustainability, I have been thinking a lot about what plagues so many initiatives and inhibits them from achieving something truly sustainable in their operational communities.  I think, often times, it's simply a matter of perspective.  I saw a picture on Pinterest the other day of two Burkinabe children's feet covered in dust.  Below the picture was a caption describing these dusty feet as a product of severe poverty.  I immediately thought of my mother, who's feet often look the same after she's spent a day at farm or walking around the market.  But, it's not because she's poor.  It's because she doesn't like to wear shoes.  One, because she finds them to be uncomfortable.  Two, because Sub-Saharan Africa is hot.  But would a foreign onlooker/ development worker see it this way?  We know that the one who posted this picture to Pinterest did not.  And the next thing you know, a black tinted SUV is rolling into that community filled with used, or even unused, shoes from outside of the country, giving them free-of-charge to each barefooted person they can find.  I've seen a lot of "development" done this way in my lifetime, but I don't consider it to be such.  That is relief work-- something entirely different in scope and nature than development work, but the two seem to get conflated quite a bit.

I think back on a school feeding program that used to be an existence when I was a child.  An organization, who believed we children were severely undernourished and uneducated (which we may have been to somebody's standard), would drop "nutritious" food off at our schools to be given out to each of us come lunch time.  It really was nutritious food.  And delicious too.  I looked forward to eating it everyday.  But, did I need it?  Was it helping me or my classmates or my community?  Was it developing us?  After decades of this organization dropping food off for us, the government banned the program, saying such feeding programs needed to be supported with local foodstuff-- not imports.  This is a ruling I can't really contest; however, I will note that since the government has taken over the program, it has been far less reliable and consistently plagued with food shortages and spoilage.  Such occurrences have led many of us to believe that much of the food continues to be imported, despite the government's initial stance on the issue.

So, here we are decades later, back at square one.  Had the emphasis been less about hand-outs and more about training our families in farming and preparing nutritious foods, we might have something to show for this effort-- had it been more about developing our society and less about saving lives.  Because, to be perfectly honest, very few of our lives were in danger.  We weren't starving.  We weren't experiencing famine or even severe drought.  We simply knew very little about the food pyramid.  We needed development-- not relief.  There is a time and place for each.