Rebecca Ejifoma who carried out investigation on the use of family planning by Nigerian couples, reports that the overall acceptance is still below expectations in the country.
Ruth and her children
Nigeria has made progress in improving the use of contraceptives over the past decades. However, there is room for improvement even in the face of longstanding myths and misconceptions concerning their use.
First mother
Development Communications Network (DEVCOMS), an NGO, has called for increased funding of family planning services to raise the level of contraceptive use to 36 per cent by 2018.
The organisation’s media specialist, Iliya Kure, said in a paper he presented to mark 2017 Safe Motherhood Week, that current national contraceptive commodities usage was slightly above 15 per cent.
The paper is entitled `Child spacing: Key strategy to reducing maternal death – time to act.’
NOT everyone thinks birth control is a blessing. Boko Haram, a jihadist group that terrorises north-eastern Nigeria, deems artificial contraception to be a product of infidel learning, and therefore forbidden. Its ideologues also believe that females should avoid school, marry early (sometimes while still children) and have lots of babies. In the dwindling areas the jihadists control, women have no choice.
Although Family Planning (FP) commodities are free in Lagos state, stakeholders in the health sector have said lack of consumables and poor state of FP clinics at the Primary Health Cares (PHCs) have led to the increase in maternal death in the state.
Although family planning commodities are free in Lagos, lack of consumables and poor state of family planning clinics at the Primary Health Care (PHCs) remains a major hurdle to accessing the services at the PHC level.
A visit to some of the Lagos PHCs reveals that many of the facilities lack consumables for modern contraceptive procedure, some have no dedicated FP room to ensure privacy for users, they operate with old or incomplete equipment and others can’t offer implant due to lack of trained personnel or equipment.
Tell us a bit about yourself
I am the chairman of Association for the Advancement of Family Planning (AAFP) in Nigeria which is an umbrella organisation of about 30 international organisations. Our responsibility is to do advocacy at the national level to make sure proper budgeting as released.
The Federal Government’s advocacy on the use of contraceptive among sexually active women in Nigeria for the prevention of unwanted pregnancy and abortion is beginning to yield positive results as more women are recorded to be embracing the method.
Compiled data from the 2015 report of the National Bureau of Statistics, NBS, on health shows that contraceptive use among sexually active women of child bearing age increased by seven per cent compared to 2014.
Prof. Suleiman Adeniran of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, University of Ilorin Teaching Hospital (UITH), has advised parents to consider family planning to ease the effects of economic recession.
Adeniran gave the advice in Ilorin on Friday, January 8, during a presentation at a UITH Seminar on: "Economic Recession: A healthy way out."
The gynaecologist described family panning as a concept or programme of limiting the size of families through spacing or prevention of pregnancies, especially in times of economic recession.
The richest women in Lagos state were more likely than their poorest counterparts to report using a family planning method. This is a finding from a recent survey by the Performance Monitoring and Accountability 2020-Nigeria (PMA2020-NG) research team and holds true for both modern methods [pills, condoms, injectables, intrauterine devices (IUDs) and implants] and traditional methods (withdrawal and periodic abstinence).
The richest women in Lagos state were more likely than their poorest counterparts to report using a family planning method. This is a finding from a recent survey by the Performance Monitoring and Accountability 2020-Nigeria (PMA2020-NG) research team and holds true for both modern methods [pills, condoms, injectables, intrauterine devices (IUDs) and implants] and traditional methods (withdrawal and periodic abstinence).
