West African religious practices support family planning

Almost all the major religious practices in West Africa has components that support the practice of family planning.

As a result, the Health Policy Project (HPP), in collaboration with religious leaders of the major religions practiced in the sub-region had come together to develop an advocacy tool for the promotion of family planning among the religious grouping in the West African sub-region.

This came out at the formal opening of an international end of project review meeting of the first phase of the HPP in West Africa in Accra.

The five-year project was funded by the United States International Development Agency (USAID), and implemented by Futures Group, a Civil Society Organization in collaboration with some local and international implementers.

It was aimed at helping West African Countries to adopt national family planning policies, and provide budgetary allocations for their implementation.

This is expected to provide easy access to effective family planning services to many people in the West African sub-region, which has some of the fastest growing populations in the world.

This is expected to help reduce the high health risk suffered by many women in the West African sub-region, as a result of unplanned pregnancies and poor birth spacing, which often result in high maternal deaths and death of children.

The project, therefore, hoped to help address these issues and provide mothers' easy access to effective contraceptives, to enable them stay alive to contribute towards the social economic development of their countries.

The project also aimed at helping vulnerable people living with HIV to overcome discrimination and stigmatization, to access health care to stay alive and help reduce the spread of the HIV in the region.

Among the key achievements of the project is to get nine Francophone countries in West

Africa and Cameroon to come out with coasted national family planning programmes for the first time.

The project was able to develop tools to convince policy makers to adopt family planning as part of their national health programmes, and backed them with budgetary allocations,

The participants, who included representatives of the nine Francophone countries that signed the Ouagadougou partnership, including Togo, Burkina Faso, Benin, Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Guinea, Cameroon, Cote D’Voire and Ghana and Nigeria, are expected to share their experience in the implementation of the project.