Knowledge, attitudes and practices of community leaders towards family planning at slum areas in Egypt

الملخص EN

Background: Egypt's still grows each year by approximately 1.5 million people.

United Nations projections indicate that the population will grow from 62.3 million 1995 to 95.6 million by 2026 and will reach 114.8 million before it stabilizes in the year 2065.

Objectives: The aim of this study is to identify the community leaders at slum areas and to assess their knowledge, attitudes and practices towards family planning program.

Subjects and Methods: This is a descriptive study based on cross-sectional approach.

Cairo, Giza, Kalubia, and Alexandria were chosen to implement the study as they are the major urban governorates.

By multistage random sampling technique, we have chosen 8 slum areas : ( 2 areas from each governorates).

The target population of the study was Community Leaders at the selected slum areas.

A Sample size of 50 Community leaders was chosen from each governorate ( except in Kalubia, a 48 community leaders were found).

An interviewing questionnaire was used to measure their knowledge, attitudes, and practices towards family planning program.

Results: It was noticed that community leaders in Alexandria were the youngest (33.28±6.04 years), while community leaders in Giza were the eldest (42.78±8.98 years).

More than half (52.5 %) of community leaders have a university education and 36.9 % have secondary education.

Giving birth according to family condition (53.5%), delivery of 2 children (25.3 %) and spacing pregnancy (18.2%) were the main meaning of family planning in the opinion of community leaders.

Safety and efficacy is an essential conditions in the family planning method in the opinions of (92.9 %) and (88.9 %) of community leaders respectively.

Community leaders stated that IUDs and Contraceptive pills were the most contraceptive methods used by the mothers, (91.9 %) and (75.8 %) respectively.

Most of the community leaders Agree that the government encourages FP because of economic problems (95.5 %).

Distribution of methods was the most common role (61.6 %) followed by information supply (23.2 %).

Conclusion : According to the findings of the study the research team comes to the following conclusions : The majority of community leaders in the slum areas were governmental employees, have an accepted educational background, have good level of understanding regarding family planning concepts and methods.

They are aware of family planning practice in the areas they served.

However, a considerable percentage of them don't know types of family planning services in PHC facilities.

According to the above mentioned conclusions the research team comes to the following recommendations: Efforts are needed by the community leaders to define themselves to members of slum areas community which may be done by the help of the mass media, Proper training of community leaders and creating proper channels of communications between community leaders and PHC facilities.