It has reported that no fewer than 41, 000 rural women in Nasarawa State have adopted family planning.
Mrs Esther Yonah, Task Shifting and Task Sharing Policy Coordinator for IntegratE Project has said.IntegratE Project is an initiative funded by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation targeted at increasing service delivery for contraceptive mix and Primary Healthcare among Community Pharmacists (CPs), Patent and Proprietary Medicine Vendors (PPMVs).
The Project is being implemented by Society for Family Health and other partners in collaboration with Nasarawa State Government.
The meeting was held by the Nasarawa State Ministry of Health, Nasarawa State Primary Healthcare Development Agency (NAPHDA) in collaboration with Society for Family Health (SFH), lead implementing partner of the project.
Esther who is also the Head of Gender, Adolescent, School Health Services and Elderly Care, state Ministry of Health, stated this at the Nasarawa State IntegratE Mid-Project Dissemination meeting on Friday in Lafia.
She explained that this statistics was just for women who were accessing family planning from the private CPs and PPMVs across the 13 Local Government Areas (LGAs) of the state.
“This is the data that was reported and it is quite good and there are about 11, 000 women who are access non active reversible contraceptive.
“With this data, we will keep improving and the state will soon reach its contraceptive prevalence rate for family planning,” she added.
She added that from the data collected, the CPs and PPMVs had provided 1, 155, 651 condoms, 23, 671 oral pills, 5, 604 injectables, 4, 781 implants to their clients from 2022 to 2024.
Also, Emmanuel Odiniya, Nasarawa State Technical Adviser of Society for Family Health the lead partner implementing the project, said that they have trained CPs and PPMVs to provide quality family planning service in the communities.
“They are the first point of contact to the people in the communities seeking family planning hence the need to train them to be more efficient.
“As part of the training, they were generating data from all the family planning services they have provided for the project,” he added.
In his remarks, Dr John Damina, Permanent Secretary (PS) Ministry of Health said that Nasarawa State government had put measures in place to ensure sustainability of the project.
He explained that most of the staff implementing the project were from the state which would make it easy to continued after the development partners have left.
He therefore said that providing healthcare services was one of the topmost priority of the Gov. Abdullahi Sule led administration and pledged that the government would continue to improve the welfare of the people and infrastructure in the state. (NAN).