Individual Rights vs Population Policies. Reflections on Three African Countries: Benin, Madagascar, Morocco

Renewed interest in the demographic growth of African countries is evident in political and academic spheres. While the protection of mothers’ and children’s health is always cited as an objective, other environmental or climate issues are now used to justify this renewed interest. Regulation of fertility is still prioritised as the main strategy within population policies. While significant strides in the recognition of individual reproductive rights were made at the beginning of the 1990s – at the Cairo conference, for instance – these rights are hardly applied in practice. Family planning remains a way of slowing population growth but is in fact never recognized as a full individual right. The examination of three African countries’ population policy (Benin, Madagascar and Morocco) shows that the relative efficiency of these policies is often representative of the inability of states to put individual rights before the macroeconomic logic of development.