FG, Bill Gates to reach 36% family planning contraceptive access in 2018

The Federal Ministry of Health in collaboration with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Millennium Development Goal Fund is set to reach 36 per cent access to family planning contraceptives in 2018.

The Reproductive Health Division headed by Dr Kayode Afolabi made the disclosure during a Family Planning Watch final dissemination event in Abuja.

He said the new goal was in furtherance of the Global Movement on Family Planning’s aim to grant over 120 million women and girls access to informed choices on family planning and modern contraceptive methods in 2020.

Though the country boosts of 16 per cent contraceptive prevalence rate in 2016, Afolabi said the 2018 target will be achieved as the country recently joined the global survey on family planning hailed as FP Watch-2020.

Speaking, he said, “The survey will look at the availability and access to family planning commodities and services nationwide and will significantly impact on 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”.

FP Watch survey is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Three Millennium Development Goal Fund and will be coordinated by the Federal Ministry of Health and Society for Family Health (SFH) with support from Population Services International (PSI).

Speaking about the event, the Managing Director of the Society for Family Health, Sir Bright Ekweremadu said the National Dissemination Event was to understand the contraceptive landscape and service readiness of providers in Nigeria, provide recommendations pertaining to the outlet survey evidence and identify opportunities and strategies to address key findings.

“We hope to develop recommendations and suggest strategies and priority areas for funding based on the evidence provided by the FP Watch outlet survey,” he stated.

Also speaking, the Deputy Managing Director (Programmes) of the SFH, Dr. Jennifer Anyanti, 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.

She said, “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”.