Innovative interventions needed to scale up family planning
The increased number of health facility deliveries offers an opportunity to increase access to family planning in Ghana, the Minister of Gender, Children and Social Protection, Nana Oye Lithur, has said.
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She suggested that that could be done through innovative interventions such as post-partum family planning and Intra Uterine Device (IUD) insertions to increase the chances that a woman would have a family planning method immediately after birth.
Nana Oye said this at a side event at the Women Deliver 2016 conference organised by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) on the topic: “Sustainable Development: It starts with Family Planning”.
She noted that the country had “a number of opportunities to tap into to increase access to family planning and reduce inequalities”.
Ghana, she stated, had seen an increase in health facility deliveries from 44 per cent in 1990 to 73.1 per cent in 2014, “made possible by a comprehensive midwives training programme and the training of health workers in safe motherhood skills, abortion care and implant insertion and removal”.
The Gender Minister was speaking to the challenges in sustaining family planning programmes, particularly when donors withdrew support for the country as it moved towards a middle-income status but still had a high unmet need for family planning.
According to her, the country’s positive task shifting policy had enabled the training of community health nurses who successfully provided long acting methods of family planning, while the government planned to scale up the programme to reduce geographic inequalities in family planning access.
UNFPA Supplies
Touching on how Ghana and the UNFPA Supplies programme had worked in partnership to expand sexual and reproductive health (SRH) information, Nana Oye indicated that the country had benefited from the programme through reproductive health commodity procurement and support for family planning programming.
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In addition, funding from the programme had supported the training and deployment of over 3,000 peer educators across seven districts in northern Ghana who provided SRH information and dispensed condoms to their peers and also referred those with special needs to health facilities, she said.
Furthermore, the programme had partnered the Ghana Health Service to equip Adolescent Friendly Corners in selected districts which had contributed immensely in improving young people’s access to family planning information and services, the minister said.
Gender equality
She emphasised that universal access to family planning was central to gender equality and women’s empowerment and a key factor in reducing poverty.
Access to family planning gave women choice and autonomy about if, when and how often to have children, thereby boosting their health and increasing their ability to engage, like men, in income-generating and public life activities, she stated
“Family planning is thus a major driver of women’s empowerment, including that of adolescent girls,” she added.
Dr Babatunde Osotimehin, the UNFPA Executive Director, who chaired the session, noted that millions of women and adolescent girls still did not have access to voluntary rights-based family planning.
He observed that despite international commitments to increase access to reproductive health and rights, funding for family planning was decreasing, adding that that would impact negatively on the lives of millions of women and girls and also progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals.