Family planning leads to desired family size, say experts

Worried by the rise in Nigeria’s population and the lack of availability of resources and infrastructures in place, couples have been urged to embrace family planning in order to have only the number of children that they can cater for.

Also, government at all levels have been enjoined to invest in family planning by making the commodities free and available to the people and to also, ensure that barriers to family planning services were removed.

Making the call at a Contraceptive Technical Updates (CTUs) for policy makers organised by the Nigerian Urban Reproductive Health Initiative (NURHI) II in Lagos recently, experts in family planning noted that increase in the uptake of family planning remained a sure-way of reducing poverty and maternal deaths.

Giving the current economic realities, the experts said it was obvious that couples with many children now find it difficult to provide essential needs of their children such as good nutrition, quality education, adequate clothing, quality health care and shelter.
They revealed that family planning leads to desired family size, breaks circle of poverty and promotes quality of life.

Nigeria is said to have the seventh largest population in the world and has fertility rate of 5.5, meaning an average family in the productive stage will have five or six children.
Stakeholders then advised federal government to take the issue of family planning seriously in view of the projection that Nigeria would become the world’s third most populous nation by 2050.

Statistics from the Federal Ministry of Health (FMOH) showed that the use of family planning commodities had curbed over three million unwanted pregnancies while at the same time averting over 19,000 maternal deaths between 2011 and 2017.
Currently, Nigeria contributes 10 percent to the world’s maternal deaths which experts say was totally unacceptable.

In his remarks, Lagos State Team Leader for NURHI, Dr. Omasanjuwa Edun, assured that family planning would help people in the society get out of poverty and lead a good life.

For Nigeria to achieve its 36 percent target of Contraceptive Prevalence Rate (CPR) by 2020, Omasanjuwa emphasised the need for government to invest in family planning, considering its numerous benefits in the lives of women and children while imploring policy makers to bring the issues of family planning to the front burner.

He urged stakeholders to prioritise adoption of family planning by couples, which, according to him, has potentials to reducing high rate of maternal deaths in the country by 30 per cent.

He noted that NURHI II is a five-year project, which is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with the vision to eliminate supply and demand barriers to contraceptive use and make family planning a social norm in Nigeria.

Another stakeholder, Dr. Duduyemi Olawumi from NURHI II, said: “We want to see a Nigeria were demand barriers to family planning are removed”.

Listing the various steps needed to move the uptake of family planning forward, Olawumi said it has become imperative for government to increase budget line for family planning in Local Government Areas (LGAs), adding that increase and timely release of fund for family planning will make consumables available and also prevent stock out.

She stated that for some time now, NURHI has been in the forefront of advocacy on the need for government, lawmakers and other relevant stakeholders to pay more attention to the issue of family planning and how it can improve maternal health and also reduce the country’s high maternal deaths.

Olawunmi therefore, called on traditional, religious, policy makers and community leaders to be part of the family planning/child spacing campaign and funding in order to accelerate uptake.

According to her, the time has come for all hands to be on deck to improve family planning services in the country to enable it achieve the Sustainable Development Goals SDGs) by 2030.

On her part, Director, Family Health and Nutrition, Lagos State Ministry of Health, represented by State Reproductive Health Coordinator, Dr. Saidat Okaga, said the Lagos State government was committed to family planning and was also working assiduously to increase its CPR from 48 percent to 74 percent by 2018.

The stakeholders concluded that if couples continue to have children without the use of family planning, it would further deepen poverty for the family and the country at large.

Angela Onwuzoo