Family Planning: How we support 2,600 facilities in Nigeria – Marie Stopes

The Country Director of the Marie Stopes International Organisation, Emmanuel Ajah, has explained the health-specific humanitarian activities of the organisation in Nigeria since its inception.

Speaking in an exclusive chat with PRNigeria, Ajah said since inception in 2009, the organisation has helped a lot of women and families in preventing both unwanted pregnancies and avoidable abortions.

He added that the organisation is supporting about 2,600 health facilities across the country with emphasis on family planning.

“If you put the total figure, we are supporting just a little below 2,600 facilities spread across the country with some of them either 50, 100 or 200 capacity as the case may be. What we do is we work through our channels.

“So as an organisation, we got registered here in 2009 at the invitation of the Federal Ministry of Health and we work collaboratively with the federal and state ministries of Health to provide quality family planning and reproductive health services. Currently, we are the biggest provider of family planning service across the country. We have our primary health centres and we support directly working with government to provide services in all the states of the Federation.

“We have our channels of delivery and the first channel of delivery is the public sector channel. The public sector channel is where we identify public sector providers, train them in collaboration with state ministries of health and after the training jointly do supervision to get the providers that have been trained up to speed, so they are able to provide services.

“Before we started this, we work with government to develop the current training manual that is being used by all the partners across the country,” he said.

Ajah noted that the manual used for the organisation’s operations are available on the website of the Federal Ministry of Health “because, when they disseminated, they had developed supportive supervision tools used and ensure that services are being provided.”

“We equally work with what we call our social franchises. The Blue Star Healthcare Network which is the private angle of the work that we do and they are just a little below 150, they are not in all the states because for private sector, it is largely in the south where private sector is more viable to work with. Most of our primary healthcare are privately owned clinics. Again, what we do is identify those who are fully aligned and understand that we can provide family planning service. But what we try to understand is that before we started our intervention, it was very clear that some of these service providers including the private sector were already providing this. So, in what we call harm reduction, we had to put them in and make sure they are properly trained so that they can continue to provide those services.

“We have what we call our MS ladies who are largely in the North are midwives, nurses and senior CHEFS, retired but not tired, some still have services they do in our private or public facilities but we do know that because women are included in certain locations, the only people that can provide family service for them are those who can really identify with them. Therefore, we work with those women to identify a roadmap. They are mostly in Kano, Kaduna, Jigawa a little bit in Katsina, Yobe,” he added.