Family Planning Week highlights consistent campaign
The 2016 Family Planning Week has been launched with a commitment to a consistent campaign to emphasise and ensure that every single pregnancy in Ghana is wanted and planned for.
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To that effect, the Ghana Health Service (GHS) and its partners have instituted a nationwide behavioural change communication campaign to promote the effective use of modern family planning methods and contraception.
The week, which is marked annually in September, is to raise awareness on the proper use and benefits of contraception and to promote sexual reproductive health.
The occasion also coincided with the celebration of the World Contraception Day and is being celebrated on the theme: “Family planning-it’s your life; take control!”
According to a survey conducted by the Ghana Health Service (GHS) and the National Population Council in 2014, although 90 per cent of the Ghanaian population were aware of the modern family planning methods available in Ghana, only a few applied that knowledge.
The campaign also targets how family planning can be used to manage Ghana’s fast-growing population to propel, accelerate and sustain the country’s socio-economic development.
Launching
Launching the week-long activities and a year-long celebration in Accra on Monday, the Director-General of the GHS, Dr Ebenezer Appiah Denkyira, in a statement read on his behalf, underscored the need to bridge the gap between the knowledge of family planning usage and its application to enhance maternal and child health.
He noted that Ghana, through a number of initiatives, had made access to contraception and modern family planning methods very accessible to help people plan and space their children in order to have quality life, and added that, “family planning and contraception use reduce the need for abortion, especially unsafe abortion by preventing unintended pregnancies.”
He noted that between 20 to 30 per cent of all maternal deaths were caused by unsafe abortions due to unwanted pregnancies due to inaccessibility of family planning methods and contraceptions.
Dr Denkyira also said family planning could also reduce infant mortality because closely spaced and ill-timed pregnancies and births were a major cause of infant deaths.
He, therefore, appealed to all, particularly, religious leaders, traditional leaders, teachers and health professionals to put all hands on deck in promoting modern family planning practices.
Government committed
In a keynote address read on his behalf, the Minister of Health, Mr Alex Segbefia, said contrary to the misconception that family planning was for couples, it was also available to single and young people who were sexually active.
He expressed the government’s commitment to the maintenance and promotion of family planning as an integral part of national development efforts.
He, therefore, called for more and continued support from the private sector to make family planning easily accessible and usable for all.
The health sector’s development partners respectively pledged the continuous support to family planning promotion agenda in Ghana.
Family planning, national development
The survey, conducted by the GHS and the NPC also established that Ghana had one of the fastest growing populations in the world with 700,000 surviving newborns annually.
The report estimated that the rate of Ghana’s population growth made it a fragile one which was growing faster than what the economy could support.
With a present population of 27 million, it is estimated that the country’s population would be at a peak of 60 million by 2050 if population growth is not managed now.
The 2016 Family Planning Week celebration, therefore, also targets how family planning can be used to manage Ghana’s fast-growing population to propel, accelerate and sustain the country’s socio-economic development.
ghts of every Ghanaian.
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