By Fatima Muraina
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The Federal Government has said that it is making available new contraceptive in line with the global best practices and reviewing the existing blueprint on family planning to fast-track access to family planning items.
The Federal Minister of Health, Prof. Isaac Adewole made this known at a meeting on updates to states on new family planning policies, policy directions and update from the states on family planning situation and innovations with qualitative assessment of some projects that was implemented to develop and test Community Based Approaches (CBA) held in Abuja, the Federal capital territory recently.
Adewole, who was represented at the meeting by Mr. Kayode Afolabi, said contraceptive and child spacing could prevent maternal deaths noting that the country could still do better than what is doing now.
He said; “We have to look beyond the figures and see how many women are still dying during pregnancy and after childbirth”.
According to him, there is need for more awareness creation, easy access and buy-in of family planning among others.
“We need more up take and easier functional last line distribution as well as making health insurance and health care financing matters of critical importance.”
He said federal government has already put in place motions to critically look into the six states with high maternal mortality, see what the challenges are and find a way out of the problems.
He attributed government’s inability to redeem it’s pledge of 4 million naira towards ensuring family planning commodities to late passage of the budget by the National Assembly.
Also speaking, the representative of the Executive Director of Development Research and Projects Center (DRPC), Dr Emmanuel Abanida, urged all stakeholders to move family planning agenda forward through all new frontiers, get familiar with new policy documents, more advocacy, monitoring and financing towards having new narratives and success stories.
Other presentations dwell on gender analysis of family planning Policies, family planning Financing, policy direction and performance indicators and innovative ways of addressing human resources for FP among others.
