Health
MS Miriana Muntean, the Co-Executive Director, Access to Medicine Initiative, a London-based non-profit organisation, has stressed the need for Nigeria to sustain efforts in Family Planning to gain from the initiative.
She gave the advice in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Abuja on Friday on the sideline of the 8th Nigeria Family Planning Conference
2024.
She said though available data shows that Nigeria is making progress in her quest to advance the campaign for family planning, more work is required
to ensure that families get unfiltered access to the different methods of family planning commodities and services they want.
She added that “various accounts by speakers at this conference are alluding to the fact that Nigeria is making progress that sounds encouraging.
“However, I feel that Nigeria still has a long way to go to sustain the progress already made; Nigerians should have free access to commodities which
should be readily available in health facilities.
“It is only when the country advances to this level and sustains it that it will be judged as having done well.
“If the country is able to get family planning right, a lot of things will change for good in the socio-economic sectors,” Muntean said.
She noted that Nigerian women should be allowed free access to what they want, saying “I have been working in some states in the northern part of the country and I think that the women still do not enjoy free access to family planning services.
“I don’t think it is anybody’s role to tell Nigerian women what they want, but I should think obviously that a lot of them do want have access to family planning services and commodities and if they do, at least many would like to control when they want to have the next child.
“The responses I am seeing in our workplaces is that a lot of women are unable to access family planning close to them and even the method they want because different system has its side effects, which is important.”
She also stressed the importance of giving the right information on family planning to the people and checking misinformation which according to her could cause huge damage in promoting the initiative.(NAN)
6th December, 2024.
C.E.
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