Folk musical dramas portray population issues. Gurgaon

The State Population Education Cell of the State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT) is now testing the use of folk musical dramas in promoting population messages. Being the language of the hearts, it is expected that about 50,000 students, teachers and members of the community will be oriented about the problems arising from rapid population growth through folk musical dramas. These musical dramas are innovative vehicles adopted under the Village Adoption and Population Education Laboratory Schools by the SCERT. It follows three phases. The first phase required poet teachers to develop three folk musical dramas on the themes of status of women and gender disparity, importance of small family and population growth and its impact on environment. The second phase saw the staging of these folk musical dramas in two adopted schools. The presentations were video taped and recorded into audio-video cassettes. For the last phase, another workshop will be organized to convene teacher poets to develop more folk musical dramas on the themes of adolescent problem, aging problem, mother and child care, delayed marriage, status of women and population growth and environment. The video cassettes produced previously will be used in the training of teachers, students and heads of schools on the development of folk musical dramas. After editing these dramas, they will be published in the form of booklets to promote wider dissemination to schools, which can stage these ready-made folk musical dramas during school celebrations and during the Population Education Week.

Establishment of Parliamentary Council on Population and Development, June 1987

The Government of Liberia has established a Parliamentary Council on Population and Development which is to have the following duties: a) to work to enact a national population policy; b) to mobilize effective financial support for population policy and programs; c) to encourage evaluation and implementation of policies to promote population and family and sex education in and out of school; d) to improve child health and survival; and e) to spearhead population awareness campaigns. The Council is also to "initiate legislation in support of policies that will help improve the status of women by ensuring the provision of increased education strategies, equal opportunities in employment and education, family planning, including natural family planning, elimination of cultural practices and beliefs which discriminate against women, and birth spacing that will enable spouses or couples to have the pregnancies they want and when they want them, confident that they can adequately take care of their offspring and enrich their quality of life from infancy to maturity, as well as ensuring health of mothers."

Indonesia. Adolescent reproductive health forms part of 5th country programme cycle

Indonesia is now entering the Fifth Country Program Cycle of Population. The reproductive health and family well-being of the youth forms part of the country program. In order to translate this component into concrete action program, a project document in its first draft was developed for UNFPA (UN Population Fund) funding by the government and with the assistance of UNFPA CST, Bangkok and UNFPA Field Office in Jakarta. The project aims to raise the level of commitment and degree of participation of families, particularly parents, for developing among their pre-adolescent and adolescent children a better understanding of the concepts/process of adolescent reproductive health and desirable attitudes and values dealing with family well-being. This is to be achieved through family-centered learning approaches that will contribute to the adoption of the small, happy, and prosperous family norm. To achieve this goal, the project will develop national capacity by creating management teams, developing sets of training and counseling materials, delivering key messages through the media, upgrading skills in adolescent counseling and developing better understanding of adolescent reproductive health and family well-being issues among the facilitators. The strategy to be used is to set up small groups of 20-30 families which will regularly meet to discuss adolescent problems and issues with the help of cadres. They will be supported by provincial reproductive health and family well-being counseling centers which will also be set up to handle serious cases difficult for parents to handle. These centers, to be run by NGOs, will provide counseling services to parents and youth, evolve innovative and culturally acceptable counseling techniques, and at the same time serve as material and information collection, development and dissemination centers. The project will be launched in collaboration with seven NGOs in seven selected provinces. It is currently under review by UNFPA and the Government.