Promoting family planning : For Ghana’s sustainable development

Ghana recently hosted the 7th Africa Conference on Sexual Health and Rights, which called for the expansion of access to family planning for women and youth as key to reducing maternal mortality, enabling the realization of reproductive rights, and improving adolescent sexual and reproductive health. The outcome document also clearly echoed the very strong evidence that expanding access to family planning is critical to harnessing a bountiful demographic dividend, and accelerating the sustainable development of countries like Ghana. 

Notable progress

Ghana has made notable progress in reducing maternal mortality and increasing family planning uptake since the late 1980s. But the country could do much better. The population continues to grow at 2.5 per cent per year and deaths from induced abortion still account for over 10 per cent of maternal deaths, largely because fertility decline has stalled since 1998 at between 4.0 and 4.4 children per woman. Uptake of modern contraception by currently married women has hovered around 20 per cent since 2003. Even more worrisome is the fact that the percentage of girls aged 15 to 19 who have had children or are currently pregnant in Ghana has remained relatively unchanged at around 14per cent since 1998.

Tripling population

With Ghana's total population tripling in size from around 9 million in 1970 to over 27 million today, achieving rapid and sustained increases in the standard of living and quality of life of the majority of Ghanaians has become quite challenging. More resources and efforts need to be committed to increasing access to comprehensive sexuality education and sexual and reproductive health services, including family planning, for women and young people, especially adolescent girls. This must take place alongside dedicated pursuit of expanded access to secondary education for all, most particularly for adolescent girls. Investment in family planning is one of the best investments countries can make.  In Ghana, each additional dollar spent on contraception reduces the cost of pregnancy-related care by $2.

Young adult population

Ghana now has its largest young adult population ever (about a third of the total population, at over 8 million in 2015). This presents a unique opportunity for the country to harness accelerated rates of social and economic development by generating significantly more resources from this productive-age population than needed for consumption. Such an outcome requires sustained, multi-sectorial actions and investments by government, the private sector and civil society to improve the health, income-earning skills, productivity and empowerment of young Ghanaians, ensure their access to credit and to entrepreneurship training, and create well-paying jobs for them. But too many young Ghanaians are currently exposed to high levels of unwanted pregnancy, sexually transmitted infections, unemployment and underemployment, and other disadvantages. Ensuring that young people have access to sexual and reproductive health services and information is one of the most cost-effective means of fully harnessing the skills, energies and creativity of young Ghanaians for sustained national development. This increases their opportunities throughout their lives, starting with longer education, fewer pregnancies, a later and healthier start to childbearing, and more opportunities to engage in income-producing activity. 

Invest in family planning

It is neither smart economics nor sound ethics for Ghana to make a 13-year investment in educating a girl, only to hold back the services and information that would prevent her from having an unplanned pregnancy, and dying from the complications of unsafe abortion, pregnancy and childbirth. Neither is it beneficial to the country for the economic and other contributions of a 33-year-old mother of three to be undermined by three additional and unintended pregnancies, due to an unmet need for family planning. Moreover, it is a lot easier to plan for and expand infrastructural facilities, schools, health services, and agricultural production when women and couples are able to plan the timing and size of their families. Ghanaian leaders at all levels must therefore begin to seriously treat family planning as a broad development issue and commit to increased investment in family planning programmes and services.

 Dr Babatunde Osotimehin is the Executive Director, UNFPA & Dr Fred Sai is a Global Maternal Health Advocate