By Ugo Willies
The Gombe State Advocacy Working Group (AWG) on Family Planning says the improvement by women accessing child spacing services is worthy of commendation.
State Chairman of the group, Comrade Alhassan Yahaya, stated in an interview with our correspondent on the sidelines of a close out meeting of a programme carried out by Saif Advocacy Foundation in collaboration with Pathfinder International.
Comrade Alhassan said there is great need to celebrate the feat because, “we have seen the result of giving our time, energy, resources and in making Government accountable to their actions”.
According to him, before now, the maternal mortality rate of Gombe State was very high but that by 2013 when the women in the State started accessing child spacing services, the maternal mortality rate had greatly improved by 2018 and beyond.
Subscribing to child spacing or family planning has been scientifically proven to avert death of women by 40 per cent, Alhassan Yahaya added.
He said, at the beginning when they started the advocacy campaign, ” the Contraceptive Prevalence Rate (CPR) of Gombe State was only four per cent. But today as we close out on this project, we are leaving Gombe State with 17 per cent even when Government’s target is 20 per cent. This is a plus but it doesn’t mean the advocacy platform is closed”.
He explained that, “the improvement we are talking about now is that we have more women accessing child spacing or family planning services and we were able to reduce the maternal mortality rate of women in that regard”.
He said even with the close out of the project funded by Pathfinder International, “activities will continue with series of advocacies and interactions with stakeholders towards the uptake of Child Spacing services towards making sure that we reduce the maternal mortality rate of our dear State”.
Alhassan Yahaya however said that despite the improvement in the CPR, ” our unmet needs are still high. Women expecting to be pregnant but cannot be accessed and given consumables or commodities to use for the family planning or child spacing is still a challenge”.
Advocacy Working Group (AWG) is one of the strong voices of like minds in Gombe State comprising CSO”s, Media, Religious and Traditional institutions who come together to address, through advocacies and other activities, different kinds of disaster that is being faced in Gombe State.