Since 1950, First World governments and global development agencies have been tying development assistance to a Third World country's creation and development of birth control programs. Believing that the number of children a woman has is the result of her access to and knowledge about how to use birth control, First World development experts have encouraged Third World societies to adopt expansive birth control programs. But these program haven't worked, and the number of children many Third World families are having is going up not down. The larger cause of the failure of birth control technology to work is that the number of children a woman has is not merely a function of her knowledge about and access to birth control devices. Third World women and families see children and large families as social security.
Children provide a means of income, work, and support to women and families.
In many Third World countries, children are forced to work in factories at very young ages in order to support their families. In addition, having many children helps families farm the difficult to work, degraded, marginal land that they are forced to live off of, because the good land has been taken by large corporations to grow export crops. Because many children die in infancy or before they mature because of malnutrition, disease, and environmental pollution, Third World women have many children, sometimes even up to 6 to 8 children, to ensure that some of them will survive into adulthood to support their parents in their old age. Given their dependence on children and large families for social security, Third World women and families will not choose to reduce their family size just because they now have access to birth control. However, they might reduce the number of children they have if their lives and economic futures are improved.