By Mrs Toyin Ojora-Saraki, Founder and President of Wellbeing Foundation Africa participated in the just concluded Family Planning Summit 2017 held in London, United Kingdom where she opined that the supply chain of essential health products must be improved so that every household can equally access it.
The 2-day programme which started on Monday, July 11th and ended on Tuesday, July 12th was organised by United Nations Population Fund, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the UK Department of International Development.
This year’s Family Planning Summit was organised 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 said, “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.”
The programme had in attendance Ministers of Health of some African countries, namely, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Chad, Malawi, Tanzania, Senegal and Kenya.
Africa’s first Director General of World Health Organisation, Dr Tedros Adhanom was also present. All attendees at the Summit stated their commitment to improve the supply chain for health products needed for family planning.
At the Summit, Mrs Saraki’s Foundation stated that about 15% of reproductive women in Nigeria are not using any contraceptive and disclosed that about 34 women could be saved from dying daily using the present statistics of maternal mortality rate.
The Foundation noted that the demographic dividend on accessible family planning should be utilised by national and international policy makers.
