Winess Maunde—the 40-year-old Mwanza charcoal maker— and his 32-year-old wife Mercy have seven children. The eighth is underway.
John, Maunde’s eldest son, is 20 and, just like his father, he has not gone beyond primary school. In fact, school is the least of his cares. He is already an expert charcoal maker with his own charcoal production site.
“I am getting married soon. I think I have grown up; I can take care of a woman and raise children,” says John.
His four younger brothers escort him every day to his production site and help him out sometimes. As they do that, they too, are learning the tricks of the trade, and after coming of age, they are likely to join in the business.
This adds up to a generation of charcoal-making families whose livelihood, just like their fathers, will solely depend on mass cutting down of trees to produce charcoal.
As such, even if Malawi continues planting 60 million trees per year—as advanced by Minister of Environment and Climate Change Jennifer Chilunga during the launch of 2012/2013 tree planting season—the deforestation cycle will not break.
The reason for that was clear from what President Joyce Banda said during the 2012/2013 launch of the Tree Planting Season.
“When I look back at the development of our country in recent years, I see more babies and less trees; we all know that this is not sustainable,” she said.
Implicitly, Banda’s words emphasise how the country’s environment has been weighed down by the disparity between the rising population [more babies] and the dwindling natural resources to support it [less trees].
In fact, there are statistics to support the President’s sentiments.
According the National Statistics Office (NSO), in the past century, against resources that are not expanding, Malawi’s population has grown by 12 million people in the last century (from 737 153 in 1901 to over 13 million in 2008).
The population more than tripled from about four million people in 1966, when the first post-independence census was conducted, to 13 million people in 2008.
The 2008 Population and Housing Census showed that the population growth rate from 1998 to 2008 was 2.8 percent per year, leading to a population increase of 32 percent in only one decade.
Jesman Chintsanya, lecturer in population studies at Chancellor College, attributes the increase in population to high birth rates coupled with declining mortality rates.
“Mortality rates have dropped sharply as public health measures have improved. However, the average number of births a woman has during her lifetime has not decreased as fast, leading to rapid population growth,” he says.
He is right.
In the 1990s, according to NSO data, mortality rates for infants and children under age five were 104 and 190 deaths per 1 000 live births, respectively. But by 2004, infant and child (under five) mortality rates had decreased to 76 and 133 deaths per 1 000 live births.
During the same period, fertility rates declined modestly—from an average of 6.7 births per woman in 1992 to 6.0 births in 2004, according to the 2008 data from the Malawi Demographic and Health Survey (MDHS).
With the current fertility rates at 5.7, analysts predict that Malawi’s population will reach approximately 40.6 million by 2040.
One way is to protect environmental resources is to look at the 2012 UNFPA report which advocates for the prevention of unwanted births through family planning, and that guaranteeing individuals and couples the right to reproductive health can help slow population growth rates and moderate environmental impact, saying this might be one of the most cost-effective ways of doing so.
Over the years, government and other non-governmental organisations such as the Family Planning Association of Malawi (FPAM) have carried out a number of family planning interventions.
“Currently, we are not just intensifying sensitisation and mobilisation of communities on family planning issues through, among others, their chiefs, Area Development Committees (ADC) and health officials. We are also intensifying service provision through trained personnel who work as volunteers,” says Mathias Chatuluka, FPAM’s executive director.
But current statistics still fail to impress.
The UNFPA report shows that women living in the poorest households—families like that of Winess—have the most children (7.1 births per woman) and the lowest rates of modern contraceptive use (21.8 percent of married women ages 15–49).
Chatuluka, whose organisation operates only in five districts, argues that apart from the challenge of resources, misconceptions associated with reproductive health is another problem.
“In the villages, people as young as 14 have children. Yet, against that, communities are yet to accept that youths should be integrated fully in family planning interventions. There is still that perception that family planning is for adults,” he says.
Despite this, Chatuluka says locals are beginning to understand the need to control birth rates.
What is missing, then, are clear family planning interventions principally driven by the cause of the environment.
“It is really an important aspect in environmental management,” says Evans Njewa, principal environmental officer in the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Management.
He adds that being a new ministry, they are working with various stakeholders in family planning such as UNFPA and the Ministry of Health.
“We want to develop guidelines on how best we can save the environment through increased interventions in family planning,” he says.