Social Marketing and Public Health: a Study on Family Planning in Bahir Dar Town

When the population growth of a nation does not match with the socio-economic development, it crates burden for the overall development, and reduce the country?s ability to improve the lives of the citizens. Ethiopia is one of the country faces the problem of high population growth. The population of Ethiopia increases nearly seven times from 11.8 million at the beginning of the 20th century to about 80 million today. Therefore, attention of many researchers is shifted to the area of family planning (FP), which is considered to be as a means to have planned population growth and sustainable overall development. With this background, the study is designed to focus on the issue of FP from social marketing perspective in Bahir Dar town of Ethiopia. The purpose of the study is to analyze the knowledge, attitude and practices of FP in the region, while identifying the factors affecting individual behavior of FP and contraceptive use. Additionally, an assessment of the promotional activities used by social marketers to increase the awareness and knowledge, and reducing the factors negatively affecting the behavior of consumers to adopt FP methods was made.