Case Study: Gambias Youthful Population

As Gambia is an LEDC, they lack the funds to employ a huge amount of doctors to the area. This means that for every doctor, there are 14,536 patients meaning that the inhabitants dont mother much healthcare. This has contributed to a relatively short life expectancy of erect 54 years for a man and 57 years for a woman. The lack of healthcare for sale has also meant that there is an extremely luxuriously infant mortality ordain of 73 per 1000 pack, even though it is lower than it has been in the past. As many children die at an betimes age, parents tend to have a large number of children to avail with insouciant tasks, to bring a grittyer income to the family and to look after the parents when they reach chastening health. Gambia has a high birth rate of 40 per 1000 people because of this and in 2003, the average fertility rate was 5.13.What are the positive and cast out impacts?Due the high birth rate, falling infant mortality rate and improvements in the level of health care available, the tribe has been increasing rapidly. In fact, Gambias population doubles every 28 years and in 2009, it is estimated to be somewhat 1.7million people.63.55% of the population is estimated to be aged below 25 years and except 3.36% of the population is aged over 65 years. This had meant that there is a high dependency ratio of 86100 workings people. Each working person has to collect enough to support 1.86 people including themselves, which makes trying to earn a living(a) in an LEDC an even harder task than it already is.In the future, it will become harder to find employment and accommodation and even much stress will be put on food resources, the alkali and the health service, which is already struggling. However, also in the future, there will belike be a large and cheap workforce. Overall, the Gambias youthful population is non an asset to the country.What are the policies/solutions being put in place to help the situation?One of the solutions to the youthful population of Gambia has been The Gambia Family Planning Radio acoustic projection. This was a 2-year education, information and communication turn tail which used radio dramas (named Fakube Jarra) aimed at less-educated women in Gambia in order to better inform them about family prep options and change their attitudes to family life. This project was considered to be a success, based on the findings of a survey carried out on 400 randomly selected men and women in 1991. Those who had comprehend the radio drama could name more method actings of contraception than those who had non and they tended to have more positive attitudes to family life. The most important observation was that those who had heard the radio drama were more likely to use a method of contraception than those who had not. The number of people using contraception increased from 10% to 27%, so it nearly tripled.The Gambia Family Planning Association were the ones who initiated this radio campaign and t hey have also made many further attempts to alleviate the problems associated with a youthful population, such as running 8 family planning clinics throughout Gambia. The association focuses mainly on increasing awareness of the contraception available and knowledge of how to use it, whilst also encouraging smaller families and changing the attitudes of the adults living in Gambia. All in all, the results have been very positive.