From John Adams, Minna
Following the increase in the number of people seeking family planning services in the state, the Niger state government said it has established additional 305 Family Planning centers across the 25 local government areas in the state.
This brings the total number of family planning centers in the state to 527 as at January 2021.
The Executive Director of the state Primary Health Development Agency, Dr Ahmed Dangana disclosed this in Minna on Tuesday at the opening of a three days Advanced Family Planning training workshop for journalists in the state.
The three day Media Workshop/Field Reporting Trip for Journalists in Niger Stare is being organized by Pathfinder International, a Non Governmental Organization (NGO).
Dr Dangana said that the demand for family planning services in the state has increased in recent time, especially during the Nationwide lockdown occasioned by the outbreak of the global Coronavirus pandemic, hence the need to increase the centres from 222 to 527 in the last one year.
He also said that there are well trained and enough health personnels to Mann all the centers across all the facilities.
Although he pointed out that the knowledge of people and attitude towards family planning had improved commendably in the last two decades, accessibility to family planning services is very poor in the rural areas.
According to him, ironically, he said only the rich in the society who has the means to cater for large family are in the majority of those seeking services for the family planning.
He identified cultural and religious beliefs as the major obstacles to family planning in our society, stressing that out of every 100 women in the society, only about seven have access to modern contraceptive.
He pointed out further that from available statistic, about 123 million women around the world, mostly in developing countries are not using modern contraceptive.
Earlier, the lead resource person at the workshop and a veteran Journalist, Mr. Anselm Okolo, outlined the objectives of the workshop to include to orient Journalists on the family planning situation advocacy efforts in the state, to expose Journalists to service providers and build synergy with them for other reporting situations going forward and to strengthen capacity of Journalists participants to develop more impactful family planning related Media content for broadcast and publication.
The three days workshop ends on Thursday.
