Only 10% women in Nigeria use modern family planning methods – NURHI

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By; BAYO AKAMO, Ibadan.
The Advocacy for Nigeria Urban Reproductive Health Initiative (NURHI) has hinted that no fewer than only 10% of women in Nigeria are using modern day family planning methods while 15 per cent uses unofficial method of family planning for spacing or limiting pregnancies.
NURHI dropped this hint through its Senior Technical Advisor, Mrs Charity Ibeawuchi at a public lecture in Ibadan with the theme ‘How  to reduces maternal mortality deaths’ in Nigeria.
The Senior Technical Advisor pointed out that the low uptake of Family Planning/Child birth spacing methods is one of the reasons why Nigeria still reports high maternal mortality of 576 deaths per 100,000 live births in Nigeria.
She stressed that for now, no fewer than 23percent of teenage girls in Nigeria are already mothers or pregnant with their first child, while half of the teenage girl population are already married by age 18
According to her, 61% others married by the age 20 by the Report of national demographic and health survey 2013 while Studies carried out revealed that Family planning alone reduces maternal deaths by more than 33 percent.
Mrs Ibeawuchi maintained that this clearly showed that the wide range of Family Planning methods has not translated to its uptake, lamenting that religious connotation seems to draw us back and cultural issues such as the men not supporting family planning, community misconceptions about family planning, religious undertone to family planning and also the failure to build enough confidence in the people to access quality services needed for family planning.
“Family planning plays a major role in improving maternal, newborn and child health. Family planning helps to avoid the proven challenges that women face in pregnancy/ child birth when they are too young and too old in age and/or when pregnancies are too close and too many”.
“Successful family planning programmes improve quality of life whilst significantly contributing to demographic dividends and national development”.

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