Maternal healthcare receives support

Story: Leticia Ohene-Asiedu

THE Planned Parenthood Association of Ghana (PPAG) in collaboration with the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) and the European Union has launched a programme to improve maternal health care through funding.
The programme is aimed at influencing national policy formulation, particularly to increase national, political and financial commitments to sexual and reproductive health and rights. In a keynote address read on her behalf, the First Lady, Mrs Theresa Kufuor, said statistics on general fertility, contraceptive usage and maternal morbidity rates in Ghana clearly indicated that in spite of the vigorous awareness that had been created the country still faced a lot of challenges.
She mentioned those challenges to include the inability to provide high quality sexual and reproductive health services to the vast majority of Ghanaians, adding that available statistics indicated that while there was an increase in maternal mortality there was a decline in the usage of contraceptives.
She said there was the need to strengthen family planning and reproductive health education with special emphasis on maintaining sufficient and regular levels of contraceptives and other supplies.
She also acknowledged the government’s free maternal health care package, which she hoped would help address some of those challenges.
She appealed to civil society organisations and other relevant networks to strengthen partnerships that would fund sexual and reproductive health programmes for improvement in maternal health.
A member of the PPG’s National Advocacy Coalition, Dr Richard B. Turkson, said the PPAG was expected to integrate activities under the programme into its own programmes.
Dr Turkson said a coalition of influential individuals and advocacy networks had been constituted to undertake advocacy aimed at getting the government to commit financially and politically to sexual and reproductive health and rights.
Accordingly, he said the coalition had identified some key issues, among which include the inclusion of family planning contraceptives in the National Health Insurance Scheme, the inclusion of family planning in the free maternal care policy of the government and the provision of free, safe abortion services for victims of rape, incest and defilement in accordance with the Domestic Violence Act, Act 733, 2008.