THE United Nations Population Fund, UNFPA, has described as false and misleading, reports alleging that it is attempting to coerce the pregnant girls and women rescued from Boko Haram insurgents in the Sambisa Forest, to terminate their pregnancies.
UNFPA Executive Director, Prof. Babatunde Oshotimehin, who debunked the allegations, said UNFPA has no such agenda despite claims by anti-family planning groups that the UN body is helping to advance abortion and anti-population programmes in the country as a whole.
His words: “Let me quickly say that allegation is not true. It is detracting from the good work we do and pointing at things we do not do. It is negative and wrong.
“For as long as I have known it, UNFPA has not engaged and will never engage in the concept of population control. We do not do that, it is not in our DNA. What we do and have done since 1994 is to work with governments,” he stated.
Oshotimehin, who spoke to Features Health & Living, said UNFPA is partnering with the Federal and state governments to provide support and ensure that life comes back to normal in the affected areas.
Family planning
“I want it to be clear that family planning is not alien to Africa. The Planned Parenthood Federation of Nigeria, PPFN, is almost 50 years old, so I don’t know where the notion of it being forced or alien comes from.
Further, he said:”The UN system does not go into a country except the country says come, and what we do in that country is the plan of that country. We work with the government. Nobody can force anything on a sovereign country.
“Since 1994, the plans of Nigeria has always been asking UNFPA to support voluntary family planning. It is about making sure women can take up the services and space their births and make sure they don’t die. That’s what we continue to do. It has nothing to do with population control or coercion of any sort.”
Recalling that Nigeria initiated a population policy under Prof Olikoye Ransome Kuti as Minister of Health, he said the policy has been reviewed and was launched about two years ago. “When we had the family planning summit in 2012, Nigeria was represented at the highest level by the then Minister of State for Health, Dr. Mohammed Pate and Nigeria pledged to spend $8.5 million on contraception. Before then, it had pledged to spend every year $3 million annually on family planning commodities.
“What UNFPA does is to provide safe motherhood services, contraceptives, fistula repair and HIV/AIDS prevention to women in 140 developing countries worldwide.
“Our belief is that governments must invest in health and education. This is what we are doing with the World Health Organisation,WHO, UNICEF, and other partners. In every country we have worked, that is what happens.
Further, he said: “Let me underscore that our work is about voluntary family planning and educating women to make choices, providing choices for them, giving them quality care, and making sure they do not die giving life.
“I want to correct any notion to the contrary. All we do is work with the government and make sure that our wiomen get appropriate services even in the most remote parts of Nigeria and we are going to continue to do that.
“I commit UNFPA and indeed myself as a Nigerian to helping every Nigerian woman and girl to make choices in her life so she can have quality and dignity.”
Arguing that the Federal government needs to invest in health so young people will have access to health and good nutrition, Oshotimehin asserted that within this framework, it is important for young people to have access to quality sexuality education, because they must know about their bodies and their own vulnerabilities.
The girl child:“I was happy when I read the statement by President Mohammadu Buhari on the girl child. He spoke to the issue of the girl child and said it is important that he is going to empower them. UNFPA is ready to work with the government to do this. The health, empowerment and education of the girl child is within the framework of the demographic dividend.
Illustrating the demand for family planning services in the country, the UNFPA boss noted: “I have been a doctor for 43 years. When I started in Ibadan, I used to have women come into my clinic in the University College Hospital, UCH, to demand for family planning services.
They said they wanted contraceptives that their husbands would not know about, and I asked why? Their reply was that they wanted to be in position to look after their children properly and be able to afford to send them to school.
“These were market women, not the average educated women. So if you looked at the acceptance of family planning in most of Africa today, what you see is that injectables is what most women want and that is what they get.
Dignity Kits: He said UNFPA’s reproductive health kits and Dignity Kits are being deployed to strengthen sexual and reproductive health in the conflict-affected states.
“The Dignity Kit is like what you get on an airplane, it contains personal items like soap, toothpaste, underwear, sanitary towels.”
In collaboration with the state governments, health workers have been mobilised and deployed to providing psychosocial support and health services to the rescued women and girls, as their family and community members.
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