The federal health ministry has launched a new four-year plan to change how family planning is communicated nationwide and the “Green Dot”—the new logo for family planning services across the country.
Health minister Isaac Adewole who launched both the document and logo at the start of the 2017 consultative meeting of family planning stakeholders in Abuja, said Nigeria has built family planning into its Economic Recovery and Growth Policy, which emphasizes population management.
“We need to do three things: put resources, invest in growing people with extension to women and children, and invest in family planning,” he said in reference to how Nigeria could reap demographic dividends.
“By adopting family planning in an aggressive manner, we will eliminate a third of maternal mortality,” said Adewole.
The adoption could see fertility rate drop with increasing access and use of modern contraceptives.
The Green Dot will be displayed at health centres to indicate availability of family planning products and services. It was chosen because it was considered simple, non-controversial, abstract, easy to describe and raised no national sensitivities across Nigeria’s geopolitical zones.
Many mothers die from unplanned and unwanted pregnancies, but the growing number of children and dependents outweighing working population is overwhelming the country’s resources, he noted.
“It is critical to have an effective population management strategy,” he said, quoting the ERGP. “We need to reduce the number of babies so that the boat can move faster.”
The meeting, supported by the United Nations Population Fund, is a premier platform for family planning in Nigeria and is holding for the fifth straight year to push aggressive communication to knock down barriers to uptake of family planning.
UNFPA representative in Nigeria, Diene Keita, said, “Nigeria has made significant progress towards improving the health status of women and children in the last fifteen years.”
But she added the leading causes of maternal deaths were preventable—“using basic low-cost essential supplies and educating women.”
The federal health ministry has pledged $4 million every year until 2020 to buy contraceptives for public sector use, an increase from the $3 million committed from 2011 to 2014—and will also pay off backlog of commitments.
State governments last year allocated more than $7 million in matching funds for family planning through loans disbursed under the Save One Million Lives.
A further step is to have health insurance cover family planning—or at least have some programme reimburse the cost of such services in both public and private sector.
