to promote impact of family planning activities in Oyo State, several players and partners have been working together to reduce maternal and child mortality rate.
The partners include Society for Family Health (SFH), Association for Reproductive and Family Health (ARFH), the Nigerian Urban Reproductive Health Initiative (NURHI) and Marie Stopes International of Nigeria. They joined the state government to develop Costed Implementation Plan (CIP).
Commissioner for Health, Dr. Azeez Adeduntan, explained that the CIP otherwise known as the Oyo State Family Planning Blue print (2016-2020), “is a holistic document that will help streamline the activities of all stakeholders in family planning to achieve a scale up to 45 per cent, the Contraceptive Prevalence Rate (CPR) in the state.
“The blueprint has two main sections. The first section provides information on the current structure of family planning programming in the state while section two deals with the strategic repositioning of family planning services in the state in the next five years.
“The blueprint addresses different thematic areas bordering on demand creation, service delivery, supplies and commodities, FP policies, financing, supervision, monitoring and evaluation as well as areas of partnership and collaboration.
“The document also highlights the challenges in achieving the desired vision as well as suggesting ways forward to address the identified challenges.”
While acknowledging the importance of the partners, Adeduntan said their intervention resulted in improved CPR in the state from 9.4 percent in 2008 to 24.4 percent in 2003 according to data by Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey (NDHS).
To achieve better operationalization of the blueprint, Partnership for Advocacy in Child and Family Health (PACFaH), recently organized a three-day workshop to support the Oyo State Primary Health Care Development Board on annual execution plan for the state’s CIP on Family Planning.
The workshop held at Ilora between June 7 and 9, 2017. The CIP for Family Planning spanning a period of three years (2017–2020) is to be implemented at a cost of N6.5 billion.
PACFaH’s national coordinator, Dr. Emmanuel Abanida, said: “There is already a plan, CIP, but our meeting here is to fashion out ways to execute the plan. That is why stakeholders were invited nationwide to offer inputs into how the plan can be yearly executed.
“Therefore, our attention is not on CIP but the low uptake of the productive aspect of family planning especially concept of Contraceptive Prevalence Rate, CPR. That is, the rate at, which people are taking up the family planning products. Low CPR take-up will result to continuity of having children upon children without having financial wherewithal and time to takecare of them therefore resulting to low chance to have quality education. That is why we are developing society where we have mass of people without qualitativeness.
“Also as a result, all the facilities are crowded and share by many people which engender unhealthy society because an unhealthy society is an unwealthy society. The aim of this meeting is to have universal health coverage towards sustainable development goal.
“We are doing this through reproductive, maternal, adult and child health and family planning as one of the key global strategies to ensure family is healthy and to ensure parents have children at appropriate time, right spacing with qualitative children. And also, to have children at the time they are needed without disturbing husband and wife relationship”.
PACFaH’s state representative, Mrs. Adeola Awakan, said the “CIP’s vision is to engender universal and unrestricted access to family planning with a goal to increase CPR from 37.4 percent to about 60 percent thereby contributing to both infant and Maternal Mortality Rate (MMR) reduction by 75 percent in Oyo State by 2020.”
Executive Secretary of the state Primary Health Care Board, Dr. Waheed Lanre Abass, maintained that, “it is not that Family planning is not accepted in the state saying but the acceptance is still low.
“CPR in Oyo State is 37.4 presently and one of the best in the country in terms of family planning acceptance. No country in the world can achieve 100 percent feat of CPR.
“The present effort is to reach 45 percent of CPR by next one year. For improvement rate to be sustained, the state needs very rigorous demand generation activities by way of engaging media so that everybody will know and understand the importance of family planning to have sizable family to manage.”
A communique issued at the workshop recommended that government should continue to provide enabling environment and leadership drive that wiould ensure implementation of effective family planning programme:
“Partners are encouraged to remain committed and continue to support the government in the implementation of Family Planning programs as contained in the CIP and that the state should invite more Partners to fill existing gaps within their various country programmes.
“All local governments in the state are enjoined to create budget line codes for FP programmes to make it expedient to improve the maternal health of women in the state especially those in the rural areas.
“Media houses are also enjoined to give more airtime for the airing of issues relating to safe motherhood and FP. This is to create awareness and ensure massive uptake of FP programmes being provided.
“Effective supervisory and monitoring mechanism should be put in place by the Government to ensure quality delivery of FP programmes and reduce quackery and Government should hire more competent professionals to provide skilled services and also capitalize on the ongoing N-Power human resource to meet some of the critical health providers’ needs in rural areas of the state.
“The government was also urged to embark on equitable distribution of skilled healthcare personnel to ensure coverage of all rural areas in the state. This is to address the current lopsidedness in health manpower distribution in the state and the Government to fast track the implementation of the task shifting policy as an emergency stop-gap to address the critical shortage of skilled manpower in the Health sector.
“The general populace is encouraged to embrace the philosophy of FP as a means of improving health and well-being of individuals and family.”

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