A/42/427
English
Page 111
The environment is the business of everybody, development is the business of everybody, life and living is the business of everybody. I think the solution will be found in eacouraging mass environmental literacy so that there can be democratic and literate decisions, because if decisions are taken by a few without the incorporation of the opinion of the masses, the NGOs especially included, the likelihood is that the situations will not succeed. They will be imposed from above, the people will not respond positively to them, and the project is lost before it is launched.
Joseph Ouma
Dean of School of Environmental Studies
Moi University
WCED Public Hearing
Nairobi, 23 Sept 1986
and enforce minimum-age child labour laws, and to provide publicly financed social security will all lower fertility rates. Improved public health and child nutrition programmes that bring down infant mortality rates – so parents do not need 'extra' children as insurance against child death – can also help to reduce fertility levels.
38. All these programmes are effective in bringing down birth rates only when their benefits are shared by the majority. Societies that attempt to spread the benefits of economic growth to a wider segment of the population may do better at lowering birth rates than societies with both faster and higher levels of economic growth but a less even sharing of the benefits of that growth.
39. Thus developing-country population strategies must deal not only with the population variable as such but also with the underlying social and economic conditions of underdevelopment. They must be multifaceted campaigns: to strengthen social, cultural, and economic motivations for couples to have small families and, through family planning programmes, to provide to all who want them the education, technological means, and services required to control family size.
40. Family planning services in many developing countries suffer by being isolated from other programmes that reduce fertility and even from those that increase motivation to use such services. They remain separate both in design and implementation from such fertility-related programmes as nutrition, public health, mother and child care, and preschool education that take place in the same area and that are often funded by the same agency.
41, Such services must therefore be integrated with other efforts to improve access to health care and education. The clinical support needed for most modern contraceptive methods makes family planning services heavily dependent on the health
