Media practitioners in Kaduna have been tasked to support the State Primary Healthcare Development Agency in increasing awareness for child spacing services at the 534 facilities across the state. This appeal was made by Cecilia James Marcus of the healthcare agency, while speaking at a media roundtable on child spacing in Kaduna at the weekend. “The national contraceptive prevalence rate (CPR) is presently 25 per cent, while that of Kaduna state is 20 per cent but in Kaduna, we hope to attain 46 per cent CPR. With you on our side, and support from government, international partners and the communities, we would reach our target,” she said.
She explained that child spacing services were being done at three different levels in the state; primary, secondary and tertiary, with additional services provider by trained patent medicine endors. “We have other channels that distribute family planning commodities that are known and unknown to us, such as patent medicine vendors, some are trained to distribute child spacing materials.
“We have community based service providers and they issue out none prescriptive child spacing methods but refers those they can’t handle to the nearest health facility,” she said. Cecilia said that in the agency’s quest to increase demand, they get support from partners like the Nigeria Urban Reproductive Health Initiatives (NURHI) and UNFPA among several others with whom they embark on outreach mostly in areas that lack health facilities.
