The Federal Government has been advised to train and deploy one Community Health Worker (CHW) in each of the Primary Health Centres (PHC)s in the country.
This is to enable them provide qualitative family planning services in all communities across the nation.
The President, Association of Nigeria Health Journalists (ANHEJ), Hassan Zaggi, gave the advice when making a contribution at a webina organised by African Health Budget Network (AHBN) to unveil the FP2020 commitments; key findings from the use of the Motion Tracker in 2019 and 2020.
The Motion Tracker is a customized, dynamic framework for strengthening accountability and drive action by keeping commitments visible and highlighting progress while fostering partner participation, engagement and ownership to address bottlenecks to achieving commitments.
While commenting on the commitment on improved availability of services and commodities, which the tracker indicated that 3,000 CHWS have been trained, Zaggi said: “This is also encouraging. However, I advocate the training of more CHWs so that we can have, at least, I CHWs per healthcare centre.”
On result of the Tracker on increased number of health facilities providing family planning services in the 36 states and the FCT from 9500 to 20,000 by 2020 (achieved), the ANHEJ President said: “This, to me, is encouraging. By interpretation, it means that an improvement from 12 facilities per LG to 25. This is commendable.
“What that also means is that, each of the 8,809 electoral wards in the country has two facilities where FP services can be assessed. “However, it will be better if every PHC in the country provides FP services.”
Earlier, while unveiling the findings of the Motion Tracker, the Coordinator of AHBN, Dr. Aminu Magashi, disclosed that Data collection was conducted for period July –December 2019 and covering Q1-Q3 of 2020.
He explained that the process employed both Primary and Secondary data sources, 32 organisations were reached, 20 organisations responded and that internal validation was done through triangulation and cross consultation.
Speaking on the commitment to build partnership to improve access, Magashi revealed that there is the need for collaboration between the Federal Ministry of Health, Ministry of Youth and Ministry of Education in developing age-appropriate information on sexual reproductive health.
The Motion Tracker identified the barriers to all the commitments to include inadequate allocation of sufficient resources to FP, overall reduction of health sector annual budget, making it difficult to make a case for FP budget increase, minimal advocacy to meet the funding gap for FP.
Others include revise and update Family Life Health Education Curriculum and no multi-sectoral platform coordinating FP activities under Ministry of Finance, Budget & National Planning and Governors Forum.
