The Association for Reproductive and Family Health, the Federal Ministry of Health and other Family Planning stakeholders reviewed and improved female condom counselling poster, flyer and guide for health service providers in Nigeria.
This was a project activity done after various advocacy, pre-testing, analysis and technical review activities towards improving the tools expected to help health care providers to provide accurate information about female condoms to clients during counselling sessions.
ARFH in collaboration with the Federal Ministry of Health and with funding support from RUTGER’s Netherlands, through the Universal Access to Female Condom Joint Programme (UAFC) implemented the short term project from January to March 2017 with the intention to evaluate, review and improve on female condom (FC) counselling tools in Nigeria.
The project named “Advocacy for Change: Increasing Access to Female Condom Counselling Tools for Health Service Providers in Nigeria”, aimed to contribute to sustained female condoms visibility, availability, accessibility, affordability and demand in Nigeria and globally.
This grant built on ARFH and RUTGERs’ success of 2016, when ARFH collaborated with Rutgers to develop the female condom counselling tools (Poster, Flyer and Guide) for health service providers.
ARFH has been the lead national advocate for Female Condom in Nigeria, making female Condom visible as one of the UN accepted lifesaving commodities and also well received within the national Family Planning contraceptive mix and guidelines in Nigeria. ARFH’s efforts contributed largely to increased national-level support among government agencies, donors and policy makers for female condom programming and distribution. Female condom was introduced to the country some decades ago, and also supported in the context of Family planning programmes between 2009 and 2014, yet a low visibility among health workers, low demand and availability in Nigeria has been observed. One of the factors that contributed to this from the lessons learnt by ARFH reflected the root cause to lack of guidelines for the health workers to actively be skilful to include the female condom in the their Counselling sessions.
To improve the indices towards better awareness creation and putting various community context in place, significant changes were made to the graphics design as the background picture was changed to represent a nurse handing out female condom to people on a queue. The people in the queue represent diverse cultures and different demography of reproductive age in Nigeria.
ARFH wishes to thank the stakeholders that participated in the review, modification, finalization and adoption of the counselling tools in Nigeria, namely, EVA, UNFPA, FHI360, AAFP/PACFAH, NURHI2, Pathfinder International, the Federal Ministry of Health of Nigeria and RUTGERs Netherland.
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- NIGERIA TODAY: Association Calls for Extensive Education on Female Condom Usage – http://www.nigeriatoday.ng/2017/04/association-calls-for-extensive-civic-education-on-female-condom-usage/
- PM NEWS NIGERIA: Professor Wants Women to Use Female Condoms – https://www.pmnewsnigeria.com/2017/04/14/professor-wants-women-use-female-condom/
