Stakeholders urge Govt to Implement Family Planning Policies

Stakeholders in healthcare services have tasked the government at all levels to implement family planning policies to improve its uptake in the country.

They made the call at a media roundtable held in Abuja, ahead of the 7th Nigeria Family Planning Conference coming up from December 12-16, 2022 with the theme ‘Journey to 2030: The opportunities ahead.’

The chairman of the Association for the Advancement of Family Planning and NFPC, Dr. Ejike Oji urged the government to implement policies made on family planning.

He said, “We are happy the government has launched the national policy and committed to including one per cent of the health budget into family planning from the federal to the sub-national level. We are also happy that the national population commission is going to have its census next year which will give us accurate and reliable data.

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“But the government should take action on all the things. They should make sure we have a country where women and men can access qualitative family planning services to plan their families.

“They’ve said that family planning services should be free at all public health facilities and to make sure that the $4 million that they have agreed they will put on the table to support what donors are giving us. They should make sure that happens.”

Also, the Director of Population Management, National Population Commission, Ms. Margret Edison said the government needs to fund family planning services.

She said, “We need money. We need to fund commodities. We need to make the consumables available because you can have commodities but without the consumables, the women will say they don’t have needles and will never come back.

“We want to make sure all the Primary Health Centres owned by the government are well-funded in terms of commodities, consumables, and staff training needed to attend to the women. Family Planning is not just tablets or commodities, it’s beyond that. It has to do with counselling and services, so we need money to do that.

“We need to build the capacity of people who give the services. We’ve talked a lot at the national level, we also need the communities and the local government to get involved. We need to talk to the governors as the custodians of the state, the local government chairmen, traditional institutes.”