Nigeria Set To Improve Family Planning Services

Nigeria is currently doing
everything possible to improve its family planning services by increasing its Contraceptive Prevalence Rate (CPR).
The Adviser, Health System Strengthening, Health Plus Project, Palladium, Dr Emeka Nwanchukwu, made this known, yesterday, in an exclusive interview shortly after the inauguration of the Advocacy Working Group on Family Planning in Port Harcourt.
According to him, the CPR of Nigeria is amongst the lowest globally, hence the Federal Government is seeking to improve it by 2018.
“The CPR for Nigeria is one of the lowest globally, standing at 15 per cent as at 2013. This is why the Federal Ministry of Health is aiming to improve it to 30 per cent by 2018,” he said.
As much as achieving this sounds ambitious, he explained, “we think that there is a lot we can do to work towards achieving it.
“What we are doing here today is to engineer the state to decide on goals, objectives and activities that will help the state to achieve their own target of that national 36 per cent goal”, he said.
The HSS Advisor explained further that Rivers State is the 8th in the country to institutionalize the Advocacy Working Group on Family Planning and has as its target “bringing together. Family planning advocates made up of Civil Societies, those in the academia, Government, Community leaders, Religious leaders and family planning champions.”
To enhance this, he continued, the media is brought in “to come together to look at the barrier militating against uptake of family planning in the state, and design advocacy strategies that would be used to implore resources for family planning.
Also speaking, a consultant gynaecologist with the University of Port Harcourt Teaching Hospital (UPTH), Dr Cosmos Enyindah, stated that the essence of the inauguration of the Advocacy Working Group on Family Planning in Rivers State is to ensure an increase in the CPR.
Dr Enyindah, who was one of the facilitators, stated that the target is to “see how we can get to about 61 per cent so that at the end of the day, we will achieve what we are expected to do in increasing the CPR in the nation at large.
He also explained that the objective is, among others, to ensure that policy makers are brought in to improve on budgetary allocation  and release of same towards capacity building as well as provision of family planning commodities for the end users.
Palladium is a United States-based organisation based in Washington D.C, that works towards improving livelihood and economies of countries, especially developing counties.

Sogbeba Dokubo