Adequate funding for Family Planning

Family planning is a way that allows individuals and couples to anticipate and attain their desired number of children and the spacing / timing of the births. This is achieved through use of contraceptive methods and the treatment of involuntary infertility.

This was made known at a meeting organized by Partnership for Advocacy in Child and family health (PACFaH) recently in Abuja.

Speaking at the event, Moji Makunjuola a veteran journalist and broadcaster, who was at the event said “family planning is not saying do not have children but give birth to the children you can train. Family planning is to keep women healthier with children adequately spaced”.

The group lamented that the current attitude to funding of family planning risks predisposing Nigeria to danger of socioeconomic crisis of quality life. And that the budgetary provision for family planning in Nigeria is grossly inadequate to allow individuals and couples to anticipate and attain their desired number of children.

The analysis of a budget tracking exercise of 2014 family planning according to Mrs. Chinwe Onumonu, “conducted by the AAFP in 2015 to determine the level of Family planning indicates the absence of sustained budget line. Whereas the recommended actual per capital cost for FP is N750.30 but only N11.84 was provided in 2014, the rest came from individual out of pocket expenses and development partners paid for the balance”

Mrs Chinwe Onumonu, who is one of the representatives of AAFP during her Presentation of the Media Brief said that the Case for Nigerian Government to Invest in Family Planning to save the Lives of our Women and Children.

She said “the Media brief seeks to explain the connection between the Family Planning (FP) and the health of women and children, the economic growth of the nation and how investing in FP can help achieve this”.

She also suggested strategies for media advocacy to bring synergy between the two institution, that is the media should advocate for the adequate funding for FP programmes implementation, and also write news and features stories that encourage corporate social responsibility initiatives directed at funding National, states, and LGA – focused FP related programmes and services.

Adding that media should place FP issues on the front burner of public discourse by doing sustaining analyses of the strategic contents of the Nigeria Family Planning Blueprint, 2014- 2018 and the Cost Implementation Plans, both developed by and domiciled in the Federal Ministry of Health with support from development partners

The chairman of AAFP Board of Trustees Alhaji Sani Umar Jabbi who said that the agent that can make us realize this dream is through the media.

“So the media has a lot of vital role to play. We should be creating lives based on quality on ground not for size or land mass but the kind of quality of life of the environment”.

He also noted that when you talk of family planning FP based on population you will send a negative perception to the Muslim world in Nigeria especially far north.

“If we want to achieve every mission, we need to do it to the peculiar life of the people in focus. The issue of population should be erased; rather the quality of life that should be expected should be a priority” he added.