Family-planning services in a low-performing rural area of Bangladesh: insights from field observations.

This paper mainly reports the results of an observational study carried out during 1994-1995 in five rural unions of Bangladesh to identify the barriers to adoption of family-planning methods. At the time of the survey, one-fifth of 1,889 mothers with a living child, aged less than five years, were practising modern family-planning methods. Of the methods used, oral pill was the most common (50%), followed by injectables (20%), female sterilization (13%), IUD (11%), and condom (4%). Various factors that were responsible for the low performance of the family-planning programme included: inadequacy of motivational work by the field workers, poor counselling on the management of contraceptive-related side-effects, inadequate response to the needs of clients, irregular field visits, and poor supervision and monitoring. The efficiency of the programme needs to be improved to meet the demand for family-planning methods in Chakaria, Bangladesh.