Is Assistance without Knowledge and Understanding Really Helpful?

Is Assistance without Knowledge and Understanding Really Helpful?

According to the "demographic transition," after the industrial revolution death rates started falling more rapidly than birth rates causing an increase in population growth. When population growth drew the attention of scientists and policy makers in the 1950s, demographics and development in poor countries were the main concern but no real efforts were made to seek out solutions. Referred to as the World Population Conference, the first international meeting on population convened in 1954 in Rome. That year the Khanna study emerged as the first birth control program to have a control as well as a test population. Because the researchers expectations and schemas guided their perceptions and inquiries, biases plagued the Khanna study, which failed to show an effect of birth control on fertility rates.

Foreign to the culture of rural India but aware of the serious population problem, the researchers developed the Khanna study with the assumption that the Punjabi people needed to and wanted to reduce their birth rates. In his book Myth of Population Control, Mahmood Mamdani explains that there was "a significant gap between the [researchers] perceptions and the reality of the village"(Mamdani, 35). The researching staff members were all of the urban, educated, middle class; they viewed children as financial burdens and therefore, believed that controlling birth rates would help Punjab move ahead economically. However, according to the article "New Perspectives on Population: Lessons from Cairo," it is "economic insecurity [that] encourages people to have large families"(Ashford, 31). Indeed, this was the case in the rural villages of Punjab, where people believe children are an asset to the family; more children mean more working hands. "Except for two staff members, no one was willing to admit that the villagers might be acting rationally" when they choose to have many children (Mamdani, 48). Knowing and understanding the relationship of cultural, social, and economic factors in a population is clearly an integral part in forming successful assessments of and assistance to that population.

The Khanna study researchers took for granted that the women in the Punjab villages who accepted the contraceptives were in fact using them. "Although 39 percent of the fertile wives had used the foam tablets, only 8 percent had used them consistently for four months or more" (Mamdani, 31). The researchers did not anticipate this confusion between "acceptance" and "use" because in their world of experience there was no difference between the two.