Nigeria has increased its funding to commitments for expanding access to family planning for millions of women and girls worldwide to four million dollars.
 
The Health Minister, Professor Isaac Adewole made this declaration at the Family Planning  Summit in London, United Kingdom, where more than 60 governments and partners pledged commitments of at least $2.5 billion.
 
Professor Adewole said Nigeria’s commitment will go a long way in reaching thousands of women and girls with critical reproductive health information.
 
Nigeria has over 3.8 million married and sexually active adolescents (ages 15-19) of whom 19 percent have an unmet need for contraception. If Nigeria is to increase its focus on adolescents, enabling an additional 584,000 adolescent girls to use modern contraception by 2020, the country would see a 14 percent reduction in its adolescent birth rate.
 
He said there will be a distribution of $6m to states through loans to the success of introduction of family Planning as part of basic health in the health sector. This is to complement ante natal services, and immunisation routine.
 
Prof Adewole said barriers will also be removed, and policies implemented with new vigour by partnering with the private sector-Patient medicine/drug vendors to ensure commodities get to the targeted end users.
 
“Barriers to the success of family planning will be identified and brought down, just as the Berlin wall was brought down in those days. Serious focus is to break down the barriers hindering females, especially women and youths from accessing commodities and services. This will bring us to speed with modern day use of contraceptives. The ministry will be collaborating with its partners and the private sector to achieve a modern contraceptive rate of 27 percent among all women by 2020.
 
“There is a huge disparity between usage in the northern part and southern part of the country. We will also remove the roadmap for the realisation of demographic dividends. With a population of over a 400 million population, Nigeria can soon emerge the largest country in West Africa region that will be demographic disaster.”
 
The Minister said: “Nigeria will use its Minimal Initial Service Package for sexual reproductive health to provide family planning supplies within its national crisis preparedness and response. We will remove regulatory barriers and scale up access to new contraceptive methods such as sub-cutaneous Depo Medroxyprogesterone Acetate injections (Sayana Press).
 
“To transform its last-mile distribution of health and family planning commodities, as a country we will use a push-model system, and collaborate with the private sector to optimally transport, store and track commodities using an electronic logistics management system. A new tracking and accountability system will report annually and real-time, expenditures for family planning at national and state levels.
 
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