The Federal Government in collaboration with key stakeholders and partners have pledged to achieve a Contraceptive Prevalence Rate (CPR) of 27 percent among women by 2020.
The Chairman Board of Trustees, Association for the Advancement of Family Planning (AAFP), Alhaji Sani Jabbi made this known while briefing newsmen on Tuesday in Abuja.
With a theme, “Towards the Nigeria renewed Family Planning (FP) Commitment” the event was aimed at enabling healthy timing, spacing of births, and to limit the number of births among women of reproductive age.
Jabbi said Nigeria joined other Member Countries of the FP 2020 global community to renew its commitment of reducing maternal mortality and child death at the FP2020 Summit in London on July 11, 2017.
He said the commitment renewed by Minister of Health, Prof. Isaac Adewole, showed government’s interest in global movement toward reducing maternal death and consequently the health of women and girls.
According to him, the commitment would be based on expanding access to modern contraceptive to additional 120 million women and girls by 2020.
Jabbi said that statistics by the National Demographic and Health Survey Reports 2013 revealed that 576 women per 100,000 live births die yearly from complications of pregnancy and childbirth, which translates to 111 women dying daily.
“Evidence from research studies show that 16 per cent of women who seek to use family planning services fail to gain access to such services,’’ Jabbi said.
He stressed that a large proportion of Nigerian women faced high risk pregnancies and abortions, which calls for urgent attention.
Jabbi reiterated Nigeria’s commitment to 27 per cent CPR among women by 2020, adding that the Federal Government would “increase its annual allocation for contraceptives to four million dollars.
“It will also ensure total disbursement of 56 million dollars to the states through its Global Financing Facility. It will also expand implementation of its task-shifting policy to include patent medicine vendors and community resource individuals, to ensure access to family planning services in difficult-to-reach areas and among disadvantaged population,” he said.
The chairman said that Nigeria would invest in robust accountability system that tracks and reports annually real-time domestic resource on family planning expenditure at national and state levels.
He said the goal was to increase the number of health facilities, which provide FP services in each of its states and federal territories to 20,000, and leverage on 10,000 functional primary health care facilities to foster positive attitudes about FP.
“Collaborating with states, donours and stakeholders on a health insurance scheme in order to make house FP expenditures reimbursable,’’ he said.
Jabbi mentioned that full implementation of the renewed FP commitment would enable more Nigerian women choose, obtain and use contraceptive commodities to space and limit the birth of their children.
According to him, women who choose FP are healthier and face lower risk of maternal death, while children born to such women are healthier and survive better.
Jabbi said women who choose FP are also better empowered to seek and contribute more to their families and nation’s prosperity, while their children are more likely to receive better education.
He added that voluntary FP as a human right was central to poverty reduction as well as critical during humanitarian crises, which are often characterised by sexual violence, and child marriage among others.
Jabbi said giving women the right to access voluntary and safe FP services would help satisfy the present challenges of FP and also save more lives.
