Godwin Moses
Planning is an act of projecting a course of action for the future. It’s very critical to every human endeavour, more so to the family. Low standard of living, high level of unemployment, illiteracy, and technical backwardness are the bane of an underdeveloped economy and are partly caused by ineffective planning.
Planning for the family is prerequisite for responsible parenthood. Every member of the family – Father, Mother and Children stand to benefit economically, educationally, mentally, emotionally and health wise from Family planning; thus it’s imperative for husband and wife to acquire basic knowledge in planning, timing and spacing of the children they want.
Family planning methods are safe. It’s not in anyway a population control measure as widely speculated in public space; because it is safe and healthy, it does not prevent someone from giving birth to children. It’s an effective way of spacing out the children you desire to have which is important for the health of mother and child.
Also, family planning prevent unwanted pregnancies and abortions, reduces the incidence of death in pregnancy, therefore, ameliorate the painful tasks of raising motherless children in our communities.
To understand and address the problems of maternal and child mortality, Nigeria must refocus on improving the services provided by primary health care facilities particularly by leveraging on family planning programmes. It’s the responsibility of stakeholders who provide policy direction at all level of government to provides separate budget line for family planning.
Ultimately, this will make National health services particularly family planning program and institutions stronger, more resilient, and able to deliver greater impacts.
The success of all policies and programmes directed towards Reproductive Health Care particularly safe motherhood is technically dependant on efficient and timely supply and equipping of the units with pre-requisite commodities for management and practices of different family planning methods.
This could be done by making funds available to the participating health facilities (family planning units) at local level through a strategic financing arrangement and also oversight in ensuring timely and effectiveness of the program. This would also checkmate the issue of shortages of family planning commodities in State-owned primary health care facilities across.
Training of trainers (TOT) is very key in workforce development and collaboration. Local, State and International development partners should sustain capacity building through training and retraining of family planning service providers as this will bring them up to speed on world best practices on family planning techniques and procedures.
Both State and non-State actors including the media should consistently embark on aggressive education and Information campaigns to heighten awareness and sensitized the general public on reproductive health care.
Development partners and non governmental organizations should run new initiatives deliberately design to practically raised awareness on family planning initiatives such as the ‘’ Go One Million Volunteers to Educate One Hundred Million Women & Girls ’’ on the benefit of child birth spacing particularly to Mother and Child ’’.
This is aimed at raising health care volunteers to address the shortage of manpower and also to close the communication gap between the health service providers and the community and the need to provide platform where both parties can interact to foster trust and dispel misconceptions about family planning methods; this would entails much sacrifice, commitment, zeal, patriotism and motivation on the part of the volunteers to effectively drive these new task.
Having acquired basic knowledge on the subject of family planning, clients are now armed with the rightful information and equally motivated to counter community of practice relating to myths and misconceptions therefore, family service providers can recruit such clients or engage beneficiaries of any of the child birth spacing methods to go talk one on one to daughters, friends or better still invite such to family planning unit to assess first hand informations on the benefits of child spacing to their family with a view to changing the mind-set of the people.
Understaffing and postings of health workers to rural areas are issues to contend with in health care services delivery and management in Nigeria.
Exploring other options like re-engaging the services of retired nurses and midwives on contract basis for at least 5 years is a viable option for reducing the impacts of shortage of man power.
These are low hanging fruits with experience and capacity to reduce maternal and child mortality in remote villages. In the past, statistics has shown that this approach has yielded desired results in states who temporarily engaged the services of these category of workforce. This way rural Women will be assisted by trained staff birth during delivery.
There is need also to establish a platform or forum where synergy between Local Government authorities and community leaders is fostered. Since the task is innermost, Social behavioural change committee (SBCC) should carefully select individuals preferably vocal and active youths in a given community to be designated as Family Planning (FP) Ambassadors to work together to basically engage stakeholders in mosques, churches and volunteers in communities to educate and create awareness on the benefits of child spacing to the family.
The role of the Local authorities here is to provide the needful incentives including the political will and leadership required to drive this noble course; on the other hand, the role of the community leaders is that of consistent community mobilization for action, basically to talk to people in their respective domains.
Citizens engagement should be encourage to ensure that the community through Family planning ambassadors have a voice in the management and oversights of facilities or family planning programs/project domiciled in the community. This is done by directly or indirectly involving the stakeholders in the community.
The Family planning ambassadors are expected to educate the people on issues pertaining reproductive health, safe motherhood and child birth spacing.
Also to encourage husbands to show leadership and take charge of the health and well-being of their wives and children including their sexuality, reproductive health and adequate provision of resources including plans for any emergency thereof.
Volunteerism is a concept where people with similar interest come together to undertake certain task or render services without being paid or issued stipends based on the organization in question.
The platform should be created to collaborate together with volunteer youth base organizations or other faith based organization to organize talk show in Secondary Schools and youth centre to enable youths and unmarried adults to acquire basic knowledge and skills to maintain personal health and manage their reproductive functions and adopt chaste, healthy lifestyle.
Also taking awareness campaign to the market place, motivating market women to take care of their life and health by embracing child spacing as a virtues women by taking personal responsibility to ensure one is healthy to be able to take care of the family.
For this reasons necessary arrangement should be put in place to make the act of volunteering lasting and memorable to those who are serving as volunteers in order to encourage such people to come back to serve when need be and also to challenge others to join.
Teachers should leverage on Pep talk season to drive and sustain discussion on safety, health and family planning.
This also presence a platform where children and teenagers learn massages on reproductive health and chaste lifestyle, and equally develop refusal skills to avoid peer pressure and risky sexual, social behaviours, including early warning signals and where to seek help.
While time is of the essence, catching them young is key to getting it together. It’s high time some Teachers assumed additional responsibility to fight the battle and win the war against community of practice, myths about family planning.
The use of Clerics to advance the course of child spacing and responsible parenthood is also key. The moral bar of the society is an all-time-low. In my humble opinion, engaging the clerics in the advancement of family planning will not in anyway negate or constitute barrier to their primary calling.
Simply put, one of the prerequisite target of the clerics during premarital counselling based on faith factual knowledge should be directed towards deliberate and a sustained awareness campaign to safe mother and child.
Considering good Health and well- being of sustainable development goal number 3.
The fight against maternal and child mortality should be taken to Barracks and other places where there are high concentration of people from different backgrounds, religion and ethnicity.
The Chaplains should be encourage to intentionally integrate some sorts of motivation in their messages (routine schedules) with a view to heighten the basic knowledge of child spacing in their routine schedules so that the health and well-being of the husband is assured as he is not overwhelmed by the unmet needs of his household.
To the Clerics, its time to raise the bar on chastity, morals, values, engage and speak truth to power by talking about the over 80 million out of school children in the country because they potent great danger to Nigeria.
Girl child education – unless the girl child is educated we are far away from winning the fight against maternal and infant mortality.
Failure to educate a girl child potent great danger to the nation thus the assertion ‘’ When you educate a Boy child you have educated an individual, but when you educate a Girl child you would have educated a nation ‘’. A girl child is endowed with emotions, motherly instincts and mental capacity to reason, learn, respond to circumstances and react to physical stimulus from the environment just like her male sibling.
They both have the right to life, education, liberty and aspire to grow to be professionals in their various chosen endeavours irrespective of gender, tribe, religion, place of birth, colour or race.
A girl child is unique in her own way, she possesses some inherent ability to multiply whatsoever you gave to her and give it back to you. Any society that condors the lifestyle of creating or given more preference to the male child to the detriment of that of a girl child is headed towards the path of self destruction.
It’s very important for parents to take their responsibilities with every seriousness it deserved and leverage on girl child education to secure the future of the children. We must all act fast now to protect the girl child by promoting girl child education.
There’s no doubts, the way to go is to educate them to be able to make an informed decisions concerning responsible parenthood and it’s benefits to the Father, Mother and child.
We must all act fast now to protect the girl child by promoting girl child education.
In conclusion, I submit that we must all educate the girl child to be able to make an informed decisions concerning family planning as a prerequisite for responsible parenthood and it’s benefits to the Father, Mother and child.