Adolescents Pregnancy: Major Issue in Kaduna Communities – SFH …as FHAHI Plead for Immediate Release of 2019 Family Planning Budget
By Alex Uangbaoje, Kaduna
Society for Family Health (SFH), has revealed that the issue of adolescent pregnancy is still a major issue facing family planning in communities in Kaduna.
Ibrahim Muhammad Murtala, Team Leader, SFH, IntegratE Project, said this when he was invited as a guest to a monthly meeting of Health4All Media Initiative (HAMI) in Kaduna.
HAMI is a group of media practitioners advocating for improved healthcare delivery in Nigeria in furtherance of Nigeria attaining the sustainable development goals (SDGs).
He said despite the high awareness around FP, the uptakers are still very low, saying, “many of the women in the communities will tell you they don’t have need for it. May be, they still need more education because awareness is different from education.
“There is the need for change in narrative that preventive is better than curative narrative and family planning is one thing that prevent events that can lead to issues. We don’t support abortion but we support prevention.”
Ibrahim, lament that of over the 1,500 health care facilities in the state, only about 500 of then are currently providing family planning services.
“So, we want to see how we can integrate private clinics into the system so we can reach more people. The truth is, there are more people who want to embrace the services. Currently, many of the service providers are not providing friendly service that can create desires by those who want to have the service.
“The first thing we do is to map out all clinics across the state to make sure partners can locate them. We discovered that, about 90 percent of them are rendering one family planning or the other. So, mapping them have given us the opportunity to train a lot if them so they can render the services better.
Acting Secretary, Family Health Advocates in Nigeria Initiative (FHANI), Iliya Kure, had earlier called on the state government not to allow Family Planning programme suffer in 2019.
He appealed to the governor, to ensure that, the budget line of N120 million for procurement and N27 million for family planning programmes be released on time with cash in 2019.
Iliya, commended the government for the full implementation of the 2018 budget of N97.9 million as far as family planning was concern in state.
“We are here to say well done to Kaduna State Government at making efforts to make the service available for women who want the service. It is to address out-of-pocket expenses.
“We had earlier commended the state government for increase family planning allocation proposal submitted to the State Assembly. N147.6 million is before the assembly.
“But, there is out stuck of commodities. We are calling on federal government to procure the commodities and distribute same to the users especially, with emerging intending users on the increase as population increases.” He added.
