The overall goal of this project is to increase access to safe abortion care and post-abortion family planning, and to contribute to the achievement of Millennium Development Goal five in four states of the Niger-Delta region of Nigeria.
WHARC obtained a grant from the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) to implement the project in Edo, Delta, Bayelsa and Rivers states of Nigeria.
The project, which was designed to be implemented in six phases is now in its second year of operation. During the first year, a needs assessment survey was carried out and completed. This resulted a paper titled “A survey of the attitudes and practices relating to reproductive health and family planning services among private medical practitioners in four states of Niger-Delta region of Nigeria”. The paper was presented at an International seminar on Interrelationship between Contraception, unintended pregnancy and induced abortion organized by the International Union for the Study of Populations (IUSSP) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, December 1-3, 2008.
The project has now entered the implementation phase. During the first half of this phase, training curricula, IEC materials and project monitoring materials (e.g. patient evaluation forms) were developed, pre-tested, printed and distributed to the project sites. Project materials including contraceptive commodities, Manual Vacuum Aspiration (MVA) kits, and misoprostol were procured and also distributed to the project sites.
The training of trainers and debriefing workshop for project coordinators was organized for the four project states at WHARC’s headquarters in Benin City. The training materials, procured contraceptive commodities, MVA kits and medication abortion drugs were then distributed to the project states in preparation for training workshop for private providers. Thereafter, capacity building workshop for private practitioners was organized in all the four states in May-June 2008 which involved key private providers. Sixty participants (15 participants from each state) attended the workshops.
The second year of the program operation began on July 1, 2008 and has witnessed the provision and monitoring of service delivery of post abortion care by private providers in the project states. These evaluation forms were bulk produced and forwarded to the project coordinators to gather information from patients seeking services on post-abortion care, family planning, and medication abortion. This was to ensure internal consistency in matching the project specific objectives with process and outcome indicators.
WHARC has recorded remarkable achievement in terms of building the capacity of substantial proportion of private practitioners in evidenced-based methods in the area of qualitative service delivery in the principles of post abortion care, medication abortion, family planning in the oil-rich Niger-Delta Region of Nigeria which has some of the highest rate of unsafe abortion in Nigeria, with associated high rates of maternal mortality.