Contraceptive use to be stepped up as population grows

Ghana needs to boost contraceptive use in order to keep population growth at a manageable level, government statistician Dr Philomena Nyarko has said.
She was speaking at a meeting on ‘Contraceptive Prevalence Rates – Goals and Targets for Ghana’, organised by a joint secretariat comprising the Ministry of Health, National Population Council and the Ghana Health Service.
Dr Nyarko noted that if left unchecked population growth has implications for a country’s development thus the need to increase the use of contraceptives for family planning.
She said Ghana’s fertility rate declined from 6.4 births per woman in 1988 to 4.0 births per woman in 2008. However, the 2014 Demographic and Health Survey has shown a reverse in the trend, recording a figure of 4.2 births per woman.
“The trend is reversing, which is not what we want and so the country has to find set new targets for contraceptive prevalence so that we will be able to achieve our goal of having about 50 per cent prevalence by 2035,” she said.
Participants at the meeting were presented with three national goal scenarios for 2015 to 2020 to 2035 by the project consultants: maintaining current trends, achieving a medium progress scenario and a high progress scenario.
The meeting agreed to adopt the medium progress scenario since Ghana could not continue with the current trend for married and unmarried women, with some additional efforts to reach unmarried sexually active women.
The participants agreed that the method mix that would be implemented to achieve the goals of the scenario should focus on encouraging women to use more long term methods of family planning such intra-uterine devices, implants, injections and pills while reducing other traditional methods such as withdrawal and the use of moonbeads.
Dr Patrick Kuma-Aboagye, Director of Family Health Division of the Ghana Health Service said government is currently working to include family planning in the National Health Insurance Scheme.
Credit: GNA