By Doris Obinna
An expert has said that Nigerian men and women do not use contraceptives despite the excellent method mix it provides for family planning, with fewer than one in five married women using contraceptives.
Prof. Josiah Mutihir of Jos University Teaching Hospital (JUTH), Jos, Plateau State, disclosed this at a virtual media training in family planning organised by the Rotary Action Group for Reproductive, Maternal and Child Health Nigeria (RMCH), in collaboration with the Federal Ministry of Health and the German Ministry of Economic Co-operation and Development.
Mutihir said: “Contraceptive prevalence rate in the county is unacceptably low. COVID-19 pandemic has also had a negative impact on access to family planning information, and services.”
On his part, director of reproductive health, Federal Ministry of Health (FMOH), Kayode Afolabi, said contraceptive use was still low and the need high as there were 190 million women around the world, mostly in developing countries, not using contraception in spite of an expressed desire to space or limit the number of births.
“Family planning programmes have yielded dramatically positive gains over the past 50 years. The Federal Government is committed to embarking on deliberate efforts to ensure sustainable financing for the National Family Planning Programme.
“The country has made very bold efforts to achieve rapid economic development in the past four decades. However, among other factors, rapid population growth has affected the quality of life and made achievement of socio-economic development goals difficult.”
An obstetrician and gynaecologist at the University College Hospital (UCH), Ibadan, Oyo State, Christopher Aimakhu, added that Nigeria had a large share of about 190 million women around the world who were not using contraceptives despite the desire to space the number of births.
He noted that this was due to the low availability of contraceptives, especially in developing countries like Nigeria.
“Government and donor agencies must carry out urgent interventions to increase contraceptives’ uptake in the country,” he said.
Aimakhu further stated that, if all unmet needs in Nigeria were satisfied, unintended pregnancies would drop by 77 per cent, from 2.5 million to 555,000 per year.
He averred that the annual number of unplanned births would decrease from 885,000 to 200,000 and the number of abortions would drop from 1.3 million to 287,000.
Also, a professor in the department of obstetrics and gynaecology, Usmanu Danfodiyo University Teaching Hospital (UDUTH), Sokoto, Abubakar Panti, stated that a contributing factor to high maternal death rate in Nigeria was unmet contraceptives need. He affirmed that nearly 50 per cent of unmarried women in the country do not have access to modern contraceptives: “The situation puts women in conditions of pregnancies not planned for, thereby increasing the country’s population and their chances of dying from unsafe abortion.”
He observed that many women in underdeveloped countries continued to die because they lacked access to contraception.
“Statistics from the National Demographic and Health Survey (NDHS) 2018 revealed that unmet need for contraception among married women was about 19 per cent, and the unmet needs among unmarried women as high as 48 per cent.”