A demobilized soldier from Kompong Speu province, Hoy Sam Oeun had never heard of “birth spacing.” By the time he moved to Phnom Penh—nine children later—it was too late.
“If I had known beforehand,” he said from his Phnom Penh shanty near the Tonle Bassac, “I would have only two or three.”
As it is though, he and his oldest daughter are the only breadwinners for the family.
He earns 10,000 riel ($2.56) a day as a motor taxi driver; she earns $50 a month working as a beer girl. They pool their money to put six of the children through school.
“We earn just enough to live,” he said, “just enough for my children to go to school.”
Hoy Sam Oeun, 45, and his family find themselves in the very situation the government would like to prevent as it faces the region’s highest rate of population growth, which likely will put an increasing strain on the country’s struggling economy.
Over the next five years, a $2.5 million donation and assistance from the UN Population Fund will allow the government to begin two programs that will aid in developing a national population control policy.
One program will improve government research and analysis of data collected during the 1998 census. The other program will collect more growth and population data.
For example, a 2004 population survey will be conducted and compared to the census numbers to help analysts better chart population growth, said Yoshiko Zenda of the UNFPA.
Ministry of Planning researchers need data for comparison before they can advise the government on a policy, she said.
The government is currently working on a 5-year economic development plan for the country, and many of the statistics garnered by the Ministry of Planning and the UNFPA under the two new programs will eventually be used in it, said San Sy Than, director of the ministry’s National Institute of Statistics.
But first, civil servants will have to be trained on how to use the data, he said.
“Without the statistics, we cannot have a viable projection” of population growth and its impact, he said.
Cambodia’s population growth is 2.49 percent per year, much higher than Thailand’s 1 percent and Vietnam’s 1.8 percent.
The estimated population of the country for 2001 is 13.1 million, and is projected to be 20.3 million by 2021. The impact of that growth on the country’s economy can now only be guessed at, making more data and training critical to the government’s development plan, analysts say.
“The government has to find means to address the increase in population size, and at the same time reduce poverty and sustain economic growth,” Minister of Planning He Chhay Than said Tuesday at the signing ceremony for the $2.5 million. “There is, therefore, an urgent need for a comprehensive National Population and Development Policy for Cambodia.”
Some action has already been taken.
Hoy Sam Oeun, for example, now knows all about spacing births in a family to reduce economic burden. Through television, newspaper and radio campaigns, he and his children—including his two marriageable daughters—know how important it is.
But for people in the countryside, he said, there is not as much information. Nor are there always hospitals or available facilities for birth control. “They don’t know how to find the right doctor,” Hoy Sam Oeun said.
Another problem still facing the country’s expanding population is the common rural belief that the more children, the better. Families believe that if they have a lot of children, even if some of them die, there will be enough to work in the rice paddies or elsewhere.
Those families could take a lesson from Hoy Sam Oeun, sitting in a house with dirt floors, surrounded by boys and girls of all ages.
“If you have many children, first you spend time to raise the children. Then it is difficult to feed them,” he said.
(Additional reporting by Kim Chan)
