By Chioma Obinna

The Federal Governmenthas said that it is committed to achieving the set target of 36 per cent Family Planning, FP, Contraceptive Prevalence Rate by year 2018.

Disclosing this during the FP Watch final dissemination in Abuja, the Director and Head of Reproductive Health Division, Federal Ministry of Health, Dr. Kayode Afolabi said notwithstanding the 2016 prevalence rate of 16 per cent, the 2018 target of 36 per cent is still achievable as Nigeria is part of the global movement on Family Planning-FP 2020.

He explained that the FP 2020 goal is designed to enable 120 million women and girls to have informed choice and access to family planning information and a range of modern contraceptive methods.

LAUNCH: From left -: Deputy Managing Director Society for Family Health, SFH , Dr. Jennifer Anyanti; Managing Director SFH, Sir Bright Ekweremadu; Assistant Inspector General of Police (Rtd), Dr. Grace Okudo, at the Family Planning Final Dissemination Event held in Abuja recently

The FP Watch project is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Three Millennium Development Goal Fund.  The FP Watch is a survey coordinated by the Federal Ministry of Health and Society for Family Health, SFH, with support from Population Services International (PSI).

Continuing, Afolabi said: “For the first time, the survey looks at the availability and access to family planning commodities and services nationwide.”

“We are happy to be part of the survey because its significance to impact programming and policy that will enhance family planning programming especially access and uptake of family planning in the country to improve maternal, newborn and child health,” he said.

In his opening remarks, the Managing Director of the Society for Family Health, Sir Bright Ekweremadu said the National Dissemination event was to understand the contraceptive landscape and service readiness of providers in Nigeria provide recommendations pertaining to the outlet survey evidence and identify opportunities and strategies to address key findings.

He said: “We hope to develop recommendations and suggest strategies and priority areas for funding based on the evidence provided by the FP Watch outlet survey.”

Also speaking, the Deputy Managing Director (Programmes) of SFH, Dr. Jennifer Anyanti, said that the FP Watch study visited 14,000 outlets across the country to ascertain the availability of family planning commodities and level of service to the teeming Nigerian Population.

Anyanti who described the findings as “interesting” said that part of the focus of the study was market share i.e. which proportion of facilities was providing most services.

“When we looked nationwide, we found out 75 per cent came from the private sector and 25 per cent from the public sector,” she said, adding that this was of great interest to the stakeholders “because usually we place a lot of focus on the public sector”.

Anyanti said that the study also looked at product availability in the sector including products such as condoms, oral contraceptives, emergency contraceptives, injectibles, implants, IUDs and