By Iliya Kure
Kaduna (Nigeria) — Kaduna State Government, in northern Nigeria, says women in the state who want to space their births will start receiving free services from July to help them achieve their plans.
Currently women who go to public health facilities in the state are charged between N200 – N300 for consumables like cotton, bleach, hand gloves and detergent among others for child spacing services.
Executive Secretary of Kaduna State Primary Healthcare Development Agency, Dr Hadiza Balarabe told Journalists at a meeting in Zaria, that the free service was meant to reduce the number of pregnant women dying in Kaduna State by 25%.
A research has shown that countries which increased the number of women accessing child spacing services have reduced their maternal mortality figures by almost 35%.
Nigerian Government and UNFPA have been supplying commodities like condoms, injectables and implants for women free of charge, but clients have to buy syringes and other items needed for the administration of the service on them. This has created barrier and have discouraged many women from accessing the services.
To address the gap, the government of Kaduna State in its 2017 appropriation introduced a budget line and allocated N100 million to procure consumables, so as to eliminate the barrier and ensure provision of free services to women in the state.
Balarabe said her agency had already forwarded a proposal to the sister agency in charge of the procurement of the commodities to ensure the release of the N100m, and for the ‘totally free’ commodities, consumable and services to commence in July.
“We are the custodian of child spacing activities in the state, we have written a proposal so that we can get the funds to be able to provide the consumables.
“We also understand that for family planning to be truly free, as we want it to be, we need to increase our Contraceptive Prevalence Rate (CPR), we have to provide not only the consumables but also the commodities.
“We are not just working but we are running to get these consumables and commodities across to all the service delivery points,” she said.
Balarabe called for strong collaboration and relationship among donor agencies working in the state to ensure coordination, and that the state is guided properly in the discharge of its mandate to citizens.
According to a Federal Government document, Kaduna State need to increase the number of married women spacing their births from the current level of about 22% to above 46%, for the state to experience a meaningful reduction in maternal death.
This target is also meant to help Nigeria achieve its overall goal of raising the number of women spacing birth from the current 15% to 36% by next year.
Speaking in the same vein, Dr. Duste Musa Gimba of the Department of Health Planning, Research and Statistics, the life of women is of priority to the government hence the investment in child birth spacing commodity and consumables.
“One of the key ways of achieving that is actually an off-take improvement of contraceptive prevalent rate (CPR), that is the rate at which married women embrace and take-up child spacing.
“So, it is actually the priority of the state Ministry of Health to improve on our child spacing policy, hence the need to develop a holistic cost work plan to encourage women to accept it,” he said.
For a child spacing advocacy organisation like Family Health Advocates in Nigeria Initiative (FHANI), the creation of the Child Spacing budget line will help Kaduna significantly in meeting its target of 46%.
Chairman of FHANI, Malam Shehu Usman Muhammad said, “As far as I am concern this target is realistic, because there are lot of women practicing child spacing at home without being documented.
“I think the current trend is to catch all of them to be able to document the true means of doing that and to help those that are doing traditional method because of its side effects.”
Muhammad said, FHANI has been working with religious and community leaders to ensure spacing of their children and that they are seeing results.
He said majority of the people in the community are willing to switch over from the traditional method to the modern method of spacing, they are only held back by charges at the health facilities.
“There is need to catch it up and replace it with modern one. Of course, it is realistic as long as everybody makes a commitment into it,” he said.
The meeting was organised by Palladium in partnership with Pathfinder International to support the child spacing efforts of Kaduna State Government
