Overpopulation: A Solution?

The issue of overpopulation (the situation where the population is too great to be supported by the available resources) is one which has claimed the attention of many great minds all over the world, one of these is a certain Bill Gates. Gates has a theory, which is upheld, that if you save the lives of the children in the poorest families using vaccines, the parents have a greater certainty that their children will survive infancy, and therefore will have fewer children. This works on the logic that the majority of families do not wish for a large family, and they only have large familes because they try to cover themselves for the deaths of their children, so the theory is sensible as it works on trying to reduce the risk of infant mortality.

Gates' ideas are not 'all mouth and no trousers' quite to the contrary in fact as he and his wife are both heads of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which works with a charity named 'Gavi', which works to provide vaccines for children in LEDCs. By supporting this charity they are contributing to a drop in infant mortality rates, and therefore by giving a higher guarantee of a child's survival, receiving a drop in fertility rates and birth rates as a result. There is still the arguement though that if a family in India has its one or two children, yet lacks a boy child to support the family in the future and carry on the family name, they will have more children to try and obtain a male child. This is the culture of the nation and cannot easily be changed, yet as a general plan of action decreasing the infant mortality rate seems a good idea.

It may sounds counterproductive; saving lives to reduce population, but the point is self-explanitory, to me the plan makes sense, investment into Gavi by the UK work already seen a drop in deaths by measles by 75% in just eight years, which can only be possitive.