CONTRACEPTIVE PREVALENCE: FG says 2018 target of 36% rate achievable

Director and Head of Reproductive Health Division, Federal Ministry of Health, Dr. Kayode Afolabi, has revealed that Nigeria is committed to achieving the set target of 36 per cent Family Planning (FP) Contraceptive Prevalence Rate by year 2018.

At the FP Watch final dissemination event held in Abuja on Tuesday, Dr. Afolabi said that notwithstanding the 2016 prevalence rate of 16 percent, the 2018 target is achievable as Nigeria is part of the global movement of Family Planning – FP 2020 -which the government of Nigeria has aligned with.

It will be recalled that the FP 2020 goal is designed to enable 120 million women and girls to have informed choice and access to family planning information and a range of modern contraceptive methods.

The FP Watch project is funded by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Three Millennium Development Goal Fund.

The FP Watch is a survey coordinated by the Federal Ministry of Health and Society for Family Health (SFH) with support from Population Services International (PSI).

“For the first time, the survey looks at the availability and access to family planning commodities and services nationwide,” Dr. Afolabi said.

“Meanwhile, we are happy to be part of the survey because it has significance to impact programming and policy that will enhance family planning programming, especially access and uptake of family planning in the country to improve maternal, newborn and child health,” he said.

In her remarks, the Deputy Managing Director, Programmers, of SFH, Dr Jennifer Andante, said that the FP Watch study visited 14,000 outlets across the country to ascertain the availability of family planning commodities and level of service to the teeming Nigerian population.

Part of the focus of the study, Dr. Anyanti said, was market share, which proportion of facilities were providing most of the services.

“When we looked nationwide, we found 75 per cent came from the private sector and 25 per cent from the public sector,” she said, and added that this was of great interest of the stakeholders “because usually, we place a lot of focus on the public sector.”

Dr. Anyanti further said the study also looked at product availability in the sector, including products such as condoms, oral contraceptives, emergency contraceptives, injectibles, implants, IUDs and permanent methods like male and female sterilisation.

“From the presentations, we noticed that access to family planning is low in the North…, so it depends largely on the work that all of us – government, partners and media do in educating women about family planning.”

FP Watch, it will be recalled, is a multi-country research project designed to generate evidence on contraceptive availability through surveys administered to all modern FP methods. The standardised methodology and questionnaire were implemented in Ethiopia, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Myanmar and India from 2015 to 2016.

FP Watch assesses the composition, performance and service readiness of the total FP market in high priority FP 2020 countries.

This includes range and availability of modern FP methods and services, private outlet, consumer prices, relative market share by method outlet type and market readiness for FP service delivery.