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The Rhodesia Herald, 10 March 1980
ESTABLISHING emotional bonds with the community is the first link towards encouraging rural people to adopt family planning.
The formula has proved successful in the case of the Family Planning Association in Salisbury, where the director, Mr Peter Dodds, uses a trained field force of 253 women and a few men in urban areas to communicate the importance of planned parenthood to the people of this country.
As a result, 50 588 women accepted family planning during January, 20 percent increase over the figure of 41 903 for the same month in 1979.
When in 1973 Mr Dodds was appointed director, only 15 570 women had accepted family planning and the subsequent rapid numerical increase is largely a result of his untiring enthusiasm and dedication.
In an interview, Mr Dodds said that at a conference on population and development held in Colombo last year, a working paper stressed that to be successful, healthcare and family planning schemes needed adequate contact between the organisers and those for whom the schemes had been devised.
“This was especially the case when family planning was clinic-based and where contact was established only when a person approached the clinic for such services,” Dodds said.
His team of educator-distributors who, if dealing with oral contraceptives undergo four weeks prior training, or six weeks if administering injectable ones, are based all over the country.
“Where they sit down around the cooking pots at grassroots level among the people they have grown up with, they develop the emotional bond so essential in persuading community to break with tribal tradition and accept planned parenthood.”
Online Reporter
dyton mupawaenda