New "Life Choices" Family Planning launches promotional campaign

Accra, Aug 23, GNA - The Ghana Health Service (GHS) together with its health partners on Monday re-launched the New "Life Choices" Family Planning promotion campaign.

It seeks to enhance education on available contraceptive choices to help the public make informed decisions.

The campaign, which is a four-year project under the Ghana Behaviour Change Support (BCS) project with funding from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), would be managed by the John Hopkins Centre for Communication Programme (JHU/CCP) in partnership with CARE and PLAN International, the Ministry of Health and the GHS.

Dr Elias Sory, Director-General, GHS, said the project was to assist in the achievement of the health related Millennium Development Goals (MDG)through sustained and coherent social and behaviour change communication (BCC) interventions.

He explained that the BCC aimed at increasing demand and use of commodities and services and create positive behaviours in areas of maternal, neonatal and child health; Family Planning, Malaria prevention and treatment; 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 synergized community mobilisation in both rural and urban settings.

The project would 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.

Dr Sory said that though family planning services had been available in the country for some years now, there still existed a wide gap, saying available statistics indicated that contraceptive usage among women in the country was less than 25 percent and about 30 percent of women of reproductive ages had their needs unmet.

He said unavailability of family planning services to most women results were the results of the rise in maternal and infant mortality rates and unwanted pregnancies leading to unsafe abortions among other things.

Dr Sorry blamed the low performance of family planning facilities in the country to poor resources allocation, saying the need to make pregnancy and child bearing a welcoming one to every family was very important and called for the support of men in particular for their partners to help them choose freely from the wide choices of Family Planning services to safeguard their health.

Mr Donald Teitelbaum, US Ambassador to Ghana, re-affirmed his government's commitment towards the project.

He said the campaign was not to prevent people from child birth, but rather to give them choices of planning for their lives and further save both mother and child from untimely demise.

Mr Teitelbaum said the high mortality rate resulting from pregnancy-related complications was unacceptable.

He called on community leaders, particularly chiefs and queen mothers to serve as advocates in promoting educational materials and other services in their communities.

Professor Fred Sai, Former Adviser on HIV and AIDS to former President John Agyekum Kufuor, called for political leadership, commitment and support to reproductive and Family Planning issues.

They said the benefits would not only include gender equality and planned fertility, but also help slow down population growth, improve the quality of health of women and children to enable government focus on the socio-economic development of the country.