The Wellbeing Foundation Africa and its Founder and President Toyin  Ojora-Saraki participated in the Family Planning Summit 2017 in London,  United Kingdom from Monday 10 July to Tuesday 11 July.
 
The summit was  organised by the United Nations Population Fund, Bill and Melinda Gates  Foundation and the UK Department of International Development to discuss  efforts to reach Family Planning 2020 goals and ensure that around the  world women and girls are better able to plan their families and their  futures.
 
Mrs. Saraki noted: “Supply chains must be improved in each national  country, so that essential health products can reach people equally. If  a bottle of coca cola can reach every corner of every village in Africa  and Asia, why can’t contraception and essential medicine. Countries must  work together to change this, regionally, so that every woman has equal  access in making a choice about her body, her life and her rights,  through family planning.”
 
"I am encouraged to learn the results of the scaled deployment,  availability and accessibility of the innovative Sayana Press Uniject  injectable contraceptive device, for which I led the advocacy for from  its acceptance into Nigeria's National Council on Health's Task-Shifting  and Task-Sharing Policy in 2012, to be administered by community health  extension workers, to its scaled implementation as an affordable  solution in diverse humanitarian settings from crisis to development in  the Ouagadogou Partnership, the Sahel Womens Empowerment and Demographic Dividend Project, and within the developing strategy for Nigeria's Lake Chad Basin, improving cross-sectoral integrated holistic and sustainable global policy responses and rights based approaches, towards youth and gender equitable demographic dividend."‎ - HE Toyin Ojora Saraki.”
 
In Nigeria, only 15.1 percent of married women of reproductive age are using any contraceptive, with an unmet need of 16%.  Family planning could prevent 30% of the 111 women who die every day from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth.  The risk of maternal mortality rate of mothers increases with the number of children, which could also be prevented by well-spaced pregnancy and family. The demographic dividend on accessible family planning should be utilized by national and international policy makers.
 
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