New FP clients colour National FP Conference

By Benedict Sichalwe: OVER 2,000 family planning new users have been registered in 11 health facilities as a remark of a three day National Family Planning Conference held in Dar es Salaam.

While the total of 2,432 new clients joined the different methods, the mostly preferable one was the implants which hit at 1,161 women followed by inject-able, contraceptive oral pills counts to 891 while IUDS clients were 279.

The Dar es Salaam Family Planning Regional Coordinator, Zukrah Mkwizu said the 11 centers selected in Kinondoni district and were distributed contraceptives commodities to support the national meeting.

“The turn up shows that there is a big number of women and young girls whom prefer to use contraceptives but we hadn’t meet them. This indicates that there is a need to make progressive intervention methods to met family planning un-meet needs,” she insisted.

Speaking on the shortcoming of services, mama Mkwizu cited inadequate number of skilled service providers as the main challenge. She said many health providers lack skills and they are barriers to the community.

“Not every health provider has family planning skills. That is a major challenge and a barrier. If someone needs to use the services, she or he needs to have proper information. Lacking skilled personnel cause clients to use contraceptives without proper approach,” said Mkwizu.

She highlighted using contraceptives without well information that it leads to misconception when the user faces side effects.

On the first day of the conference that was held at Mlimani City Conference Hall, 632 new clients were registered, 908 were registered on the second day while 892 registered on the day three. Majority of the new clients were aged between 25 to 46 years.

The Tanzania National Family Planning Conference convened 540 academicians, government officials, health providers, trainers, and advocates from around Tanzania, lasted by a national declaration that aim to share knowledge from research and programmatic experiences to inform at-scale implementation of effective strategies to reposition Family Planning in the country.

Furthermore, the conference serves as a platform to catalyze a paradigm shift to deliberately accelerate progress towards meeting the national goal of 60% contraceptive prevalence rate by 2015.

The conference featured the reinvigorated of the Green Star campaign launched during its opening, targeted to increase those were remarkable and inspiring knowledge of all Tanzanians in the field of family planning.

The revitalized campaign seeks to emphasize the importance of healthy timing and spacing of pregnancy, and disseminate accurate information about the range of family planning methods available so that women, men, and couples can have children when they are ready to do so.

The campaign’s slogan, "Fuata Nyota ya Kijani" or "Follow the Green Star", encourages Tanzanians to go for family planning information, services and supplies wherever they see the Green Star logo.

The Green Star campaign is part of government's efforts to fulfill one of the six commitments that President Kikwete made at the Family Planning London Summit in July 2012 that ushered in the FP 2020 campaign, where he said Tanzania would implement "strategic communication to address barriers to family planning use and expand demand".

"Green Star" will be rolled out on radio, through electronic and print media, as well as at community level and in health facilities. The campaign refers users to the mobile for reproductive health (m4RH) SMS platform for more information.

The conference program featured six plenary and 20 panel sessions, over 100 oral and poster presentations, four non-abstract sessions, exhibition, on-site service delivery, and six skill building workshops.

In July 2012, national governments, donors, civil society, the private sector, the research and development community, and others from across the world came together at the London Summit on Family Planning to support the right of women and girls to decide, freely and for themselves, whether, when and how many children they have.

The Summit called for unprecedented global political commitments and resources that will enable 120 million more women and girls to use contraceptives by 2020.

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