Increased funding advocated — As country observes family planning week
Once again the Ghana Health Service (GHS), National Population Council (NPC) and partners are observing the Family Planning Week Celebration in the country.
Advertisement
Since the country first celebrated the week in September 2011, it has been an annual event. This year’s celebration is being held under the theme: ‘It’s Your life, It’s Your Future; Plan it Well’. The theme echoes the theme for the World Contraception Day which falls on September 26.
This year the week started with a national launch in Takoradi, the Western Regional capital. The celebration seeks to increase public awareness and acceptance of family planning and to advocate increased commitment to Family Planning as an essential component of national health and socio-economic development.
According to Dr Yaa Asante, Family Planning Programme Manager of GHS, a series of activities have been planned at the national and regional levels to focus attention on the urgency and importance of family planning in the context of overall development.
Family Planning and national development
She said if the current growth rate of 2.5 per cent persisted , Ghana’s current population of 24.6 million was expected to double in about 26 years.
“This situation has serious implications for Ghana’s developmental agenda and her vision of progressing within the community of middle income countries. With this in view, it is imperative that appropriate and effective measures should be taken to further reduce the pace of population growth,” said Dr Asante.
Besides, in this country, unintended pregnancies end up as unsafe abortions, which according to recent studies account for between 20 to 30 per cent of all maternal deaths.
The availability of reliable contraception, regardless of age or ability to pay, is therefore an essential step in preventing such deaths.
Other Trending Stories
Contraceptive Use
Ghana’s efforts have succeeded in making knowledge of family planning almost universal.
Despite the almost universal knowledge of family planning (over 90 per cent), practice of contraception remains low.
The contraceptive prevalence rate for married women is 23 per cent for modern methods. At the national level, 26.4 per cent of women have an unmet need for family planning, according to the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) 2011 and the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) 2012.
According to Dr Asante, fear of side effects, rumours, myths and misconceptions were the most frequently cited reasons for non-use of modern family planning methods.
The poor attitude of health workers has also been identified as a major deterrent to contraceptive use, she added.
The week is therefore aimed at providing accurate and adequate information on family planning and contraceptives; and its great benefits in enabling individuals and couples to plan and decide on when to have children.
Financing family planning
Dr Asante observed that family planning had been ignored as a public health priority in Ghana and services were increasingly underfunded.
She pointed out that the relationship between family planning and Ghana’s national development goals, including attainment of the MDGs, provided the imperative to invest more heavily in family planning in Ghana’s short, medium, and long-term planning frameworks.
“There is compelling evidence that practising family planning yields many health and socio-economic benefits by managing and slowing population growth, reducing exposure to unwanted pregnancies, preventing unsafe abortions and reducing maternal deaths,” she indicated.
As such, it is essential to provide access to quality reproductive health information and services to have a healthy nation, she emphasised.
To achieve this, we need to invest in family planning programmes that enable individuals and couples to have the ability to decide better the number of children they want to have, when to have them and stop when they wish.
She said that without sufficient support for family planning, the quality of the population would be compromised.
Advertisement