Family planning indices in Nigeria are quite inundating. But beyond the data, what else? Chris reports…
 
According to the new FP2020 midpoint report released yesterday, more than 300 million women are now able to access contraceptive services in the world’s poorest countries. The FP2020 partnership, launched at the historic 2012 London Summit on Family Planning to galvanize unprecedented global commitments and resources to enable 120 million more women and girls to use modern contraception by 2020.
 
With a current contraceptive prevalence rate of 15.1%, Nigeria’s Minister of Health, Prof. Isaac Adewole recently revealed that 2,300 under five-year olds and 145 women die daily in Nigeria. This according to him, can be reversed when women have access to the use of contraceptives and space their children.
 
All these facts, figures, statistics, infographics and more will be shared with participants at the 4th Nigeria Family Planning Conference which will hold at the Sheraton Hotels and Towers in Abuja and is already fully registered according to reliable information made available to HealthNewsNG.
 
However, what will likely not be shared is the story of a young lady popularly called Nwayiugo, who used to live about 10 blocks away from me but lost her life during her first child birth some months ago. I still try to come to terms with the fact that I’ll never see her again. They will never hear of the touching story shared by a participant during this year’s Social Media and Healthcare Conference at Eko Hotels, Lagos. She was contributing during an interactive session on some excesses of health apps focused on helping expecting mothers. She shared her experience after she lost her baby.
 
The conference participants will certainly not know that my friend, Ugochukwu, who took me as his best man during his wedding in 2014 lost his first baby last month for reasons the doctors still didn’t tell him till today. These and many other stories will be missing during this all important conference to access the progress made so far and chart a meaningful course forward to improve maternal and newborn health and by extension universal healthcare in the country.
 
Sharing Successes, and Failures too
 
While it is important to celebrate to successes to inspire more action, it is equally important to look for creative ways to share failures to prevent the government and other stakeholders from losing themselves in the celebrations and forgetting the arduous task ahead. The project FP voices is an interactive tool initiated by the Gates Institute to capture images and stories about the power of family planning. The project also celebrates Family Planning heroes from across the globe working very hard to ensure that women and newborns don’t die from preventable deaths. The unique thing about this project is the use of photography to tell these stories. This helps to put faces to the successes.
 
It will be a worthwhile effort to also associate faces to the failures so that everyone concerned in the efforts will remember that behind those numbers, are real human beings.
 

I was moved and equally impressed by an exhibition at the 2016 International AIDS Conference. The exhibitors used wooden tomb stones with illustrations to bring attention to health workers who died from various factors including government indifference.
 
Read more at http://healthnewsng.com/family-planing-nigeria-beyond-facts-figures/