The Minister for Health, Dr. Benjamin Kumbour, has said it is time for the country to restore its international leadership role in family-planning for the well-being of the citizens and development of the nation.
“Family-planning will reduce the number of mothers dying and increase the number of children surviving, and also improve the outcomes of girl-child education,” he stated.
Available figures reveal that family-planning could decrease child death to about 200,000 within the next 10-year period in the country, whilst almost 400 maternal deaths per year could also be averted.
Dr. Kumbour was speaking at the official re-launch of a new "Life Choices" family-planning promotion campaign aimed at enhancing education on available contraceptive choices to help the public make informed decisions.
The campaign, which is a four-year project under the Ghana Behavior Change Support (BCS) project with funding from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and being managed by the John Hopkins Centre for Communication Programme (JHU/CCP), is in partnership with CARE and PLAN International, the Ministry of Health, and the Ghana Health Services (GHS).
“For us to achieve our development goals, we would have to put as much as efforts into creating a well-rounded set of interventions. These interventions could go a long way to forestall further damage to the natural environment and make all of the development efforts more sustainable - including the water system, roads, electricity, education, job-creation and many more.”
Dr. Kumbour observed that the high usage of contraceptives among the people will amount to benefits like poverty eradication, health benefits, good education and gender balance.
Dr. Elias Sory, Director-General, GHS, mentioned that the project was to assist in achieving health-related Millennium Development Goals (MDG) through sustained and coherent social and Behaviour Change Communication (BCC) interventions.
He revealed that BCC is aimed at increasing demand and use of commodities and services, and creating positive behaviour in areas of maternal, neonatal and child-health, family-planning, malaria prevention and treatment, and nutrition as well as water, sanitation and hygiene.
Dr. Sory said the project would work closely with regional, district and sub-district health teams to build and strengthen local non-governmental organisations to undertake effective and synergised community mobilisation in both rural and urban settings.
He opined that the project should also blend community, interpersonal and mass-media approaches, building synergy around a platform of integrated approaches to address a wide spectrum of health topics simultaneously over the duration of the project.
“Though family-planning services have been available in the country for some years now, there still exists a wide gap, and contraceptive usage among women in the country is less than 25 percent - and about 30 percent of women of reproductive age have their needs unmet,” emphasised Dr. Sory.
Professor Fred Sai, Former Adviser on HIV and AIDS, called for political leadership, commitment and support on reproductive and family-planning issues.
“The benefits would not only include gender equality and planned fertility, but also help slow down population growth and improve the quality of health for women and children - thus enabling government to focus on the socio-economic development of the country,” Prof Sai remarked.
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