Women’s Day: Kwara Promotes Reproductive Health

The Kwara State Government yesterday advised Nigerians to prevent maternal and infant mortality by embracing reproductive health services.
The Family Planning Coordinator, Kwara State Ministry of Health, Hajia Bilkis Ibrahim, gave the advice in an interview with newsmen in Ilorin.
Mrs Ibrahim explained that the International Women’s Day was being celebrated with activities in the state, including creation of awareness on rights to reproductive health of women.
According to her, the sexual and reproductive health and right of women and girls are related to several human rights.
The Tide source reports that Nigeria’s 40 million women of childbearing age (between 15 and 49 years of age) suffer a disproportionally high level of health issues surrounding birth.
While the country represents 2.4 per cent of the world’s population, it currently contributes 10 per cent of global deaths for pregnant mothers.
The coordinator pointed out that the event was an opportunity and avenue for the Family Planning Unit to remind families especially women of the their enshrined rights to reproductive health.
She explained that these included the right to health, life, privacy, education, freedom from torture and the prohibition of discrimination.
Mrs Ibrahim said that reproductive rights also cover the rights of men and women to be informed and to have access to safe, effective, affordable and acceptable methods of family planning of their choice.
She noted that this also involved other methods of their choice for regulation of fertility which were not against the law, the right to appropriate healthcare.
The coordinator described this year’s theme: “DigitALL: Innovation and Technology for Gender Equality”, as apt as it seeks to create equal opportunities for all women across the globe.
She also believed that reproductive health was synonymous to improved socio-economic condition for Nigerian women.
The expert however lamented that religious and cultural inclinations of people continued to be a challenge to effective sensitisation on family planning.
She added that the state currently has about 420 health facilities that have family planning units offering free services to people.
Similarly, the State Health Promotion Officer, Alhaji Jubril Abdulkareem, asserted that the state government has supported the unit on their various intervention programmes such as door-to-door sensitisation campaign on the need for families to plan their families.
He stated that spacing the number of children families have did not mean they could not have the number of children they wanted.
Abdulkareem added that community mobilisers are distributed across the 16 local government areas of the state to sensitise and engage with various stakeholders on the reproductive rights of women.
He appealed to women and their partners to adopt family planning method which is free and safe.
He reminded on the need to reach the SDG target 3.7, which ensure universal access to sexual and reproductive healthcare services, including family planning, information and education, and the integration of reproductive health into national strategies and programmes.