Samreen Khan Ghauri
The Leadership Development Mechanism (LDM) program always playing a fantastic role to keep Social Development activist vibrant, in touch and active.
This program recognizes the need to balance global gender inequalities, train today’s youth to lead tomorrow’s population programs, and gain the commitment of media leaders to promote family planning and population issues, therefore LDM always support their fellows to become the part of such kind of activities. In this connection, LDM bestow me to attend Ninth Annual population Research Conference which is held on 2-4th December 2008 at Forman Christian College – Lahore, Pakistan.
To attend the conference on Population Dynamics and Security: Public Policy Challenges, it was great learning experience for me, as it was research conference, so there were number of research papers read from renewed scholars and imminent researcher of there fields. All the presentations were become great source of information and have deep and authentic knowledge. Population and its dynamics are the major highlights of the conference, like environment, repositioning family planning as a health intervention, human resource crises for health, demographic dividend, population and food security linkages, education, skill and employment challenges for youth
The key themes of the conference all about population dynamics and challenges which includes:
- Population and Food Security Linkages.
- Education, Skill and employment Challenges for Youth.
- Urban Growth, Environment and security
- Repositioning Family Planning as a Health intervention.
- Finding Solutions to Human Resource Crises for Health.
- Demographic Dividend an opportunity not to be missed.
- Population and Health Data for policy making.
There were multiple combination of presentations, yet most of the presentations comprised by high-quality information & reliable data.
Here, I would like to mention keynote address by Dr. Hafeez Pasha in which he discussed current economic, social and security situation of the country in the context of population dynamics; he elaborated background and planning flaws about current food crises, law and order situation, increased utility prices, inflation. He said that 77% people of Pakistan faces food insecurity although Pakistan is an agro–based economy. Pakistan has one million youth population that is unemployed, non skilled and lack of education that become a time bomb and they easily incline to militancy. He said that it’s a dire need to policy makers to lookup these issues and civil society advocate these real issues.
Other then that, a presentation inspired me lot, it was presented by Mr. Ali Raza Khan. The presentation topic was Transforming Youth from victims to social Entrepreneurs. In this presentation, very impressively highlighted the issues of youth population in Pakistan, it said that there is a youth quake in Pakistan as 70% of total population is under the age of 29.youth have enormous talent, intelligence & positive energy but million of young people are growing up without any hope and desire in life. Young people particular female youth should be treated as a most promising resource for socio- economic development. This presentation give me deep insight the issue and its intensity really contribute my work as I am associated with Provincial Youth Assembly(PYO) and LDM, which is closely work with young people. This presentation evokes my mind for multiple ideas taking issues about youth population in Pakistan.
Key learning areas from this conference are many like different aspects of urban growth in term of environment, security, food security linkages, health, and specific reproductive health, youth issues, education, and health intervention, climate mitigation. The theme of the conference is population so it discussed every aspect of population; reproductive health is most significant concern and much presentation given valued data, facts and figure and case studies about RH situation in Pakistan. Particularly these discussions become very useful and resourceful for me as Provincial Youth Assembly aims to give information and orientation about RH to their members and community. This conference refreshes my knowledge and helps me to enhance information about the issue. Formal and informal discussion with experts of the field, I have the opportunity to share my views and quires and brooder my conception. I would like to incorporate the latest data and examples in PYA Manual on RH.
This conference gives me lots of knowledge and it helps to enhance my vision. Each and every presentation having comprehensive and ample information & of course, this conference gave me opportunity to met distinguish scholars and researchers, I took this chance to develop linkages with the people who are expert their fields & also met other LDM fellows and exchange our ideas.
I would tray to keep in touch my LDM colleagues and other participant with I am linked. I also plan to develop feature stories and article for newspapers and magazines on population issues connecting to this conference.
LDM can promote and motivate their fellows to keep writing on these issues and disseminate knowledge whatever medium is available, also provide incentive to young people to work on these issues. Especially youth groups and network can be easily reached. LDM can together all the fellows at lest twice a year and give chance to share and exchange their ideas, exposures and knowledge.
I feel very honored while attending the conference, I was so impressed that Pakistan has quite increasing number of research work and young people incline and highly motivated to do research studies. Specially I would like to mention here the students of Forman Christian College which were actively participated through the conference, they are very enthusiastic and sanitize about the issues, their sprit given me new inspiration and motivation to work, to learn and to do some thing exceptional. The event recharges me and I invest all the new things and knowledge in my inspiration box for beginning New Year.
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