Former President, Flight Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings has renewed his call on Ghanaians to embrace family planning, saying that unnecessarily large families are widely the cause of dismal poverty among the citizenry.

He pointed out that the government’s efforts at poverty reduction would yield little results when the average Ghanaian worker continues to have a large family without taking his basic income into consideration.

Flt Lt Rawlings was speaking at the maiden edition of the AkpleZa (Akple festival) in Ho on Saturday.

The former President insisted that there was no sense for couples to have large families if they were not capable of looking after them, rather than having a few children and educating them to become responsible citizens for the nation.

Worse still, he observed that there were growing cases of men impregnating under-age girls, thereby, compounding the vicious cycle of poverty among Ghanaians.

He called for concerted efforts to curb the trend, saying that such conducts on the part of men were evil and unpardonable.

Flt Lt Rawlings said that married men who could not control their sex drive could resort to the use of contraceptive devices to avoid unwanted pregnancies.

Once the country’s population bloated out of hand, the little resource available could not suffice the people, he added.

The former President also touched on climate change and said that the indiscriminate manner in which some greedy people depleted the nation’s forests was posing a bleak future for the nation.

He, therefore, called on Ghanaians to grow trees to benefit the environment and future generations.

Meanwhile, Flt Lt Rawlings also bemoaned the unending lack of the culture of sanitation among Ghanaians and said that was highly inimical to set national development objectives.

Without a healthy environment, development could not take place smoothly, he explained.

Earlier, the Deputy Volta Regional Minister, Rev. Johnson Avuletey, said that the diverse and unique culture of the people of the Volta Region made the area ideal for tourism and varied businesses.

Therefore, he said, under no circumstance should those values be left to be overtaken by foreign cultures which would not help the national cause.