The Society for Family Health (SFH) through its Delivering Innovation in Self-Care (DISC) project in collaboration with John Snow Incorporated (JSI) has reiterated the need for high-quality family planning data management.
Dr Anthony Nwala, the Assistant Chief Programme and Quality Officer, SFH, said this at a two-day capacity building programme on data management on Monday in Oyo State.
The training is for Local Government Area (LGA) Family Planning (FP) supervisors and monitoring and evaluation officers in Oyo State.
Nwala said that the programme was funded by the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation in partnership with the Oyo State Ministry of Health.
He noted the programme was aimed at identifying data management gaps and strengthening the capacities of key stakeholders to provide high-quality data.
According to him, the programme seeks to agree on mechanisms for improving data management processes with key stakeholders for higher reporting rates, sharing and leveraging insights from self-injection family planning experiences in Nigeria.
He added that Nigeria had embraced the universal health coverage, noting that one of the vehicles to attaining the universal health coverage was self-care.
“We are using the self injectable contraceptive to demonstrate the importance of self care in achieving universal health coverage in Nigeria. Among the gains of self injection are the facts that it saves time, promotes privacy and confidentiality,” he said.
Also speaking, Mr Olajimi Latunji, the Senior Programme Officer, John Snow Incorporated, said that the objective of the programme was to make LGA family planning supervisors and evaluation officers to have a robust understanding of how to use data tools for accurate data output.
Latunji added that self care family planning is clients centered care that gives women greater access to overcome socio-cultural barriers that women are facing in management of their sexual and reproductive health.
He noted that the same capacity building programme had been conducted in Niger state and would be replicated in Lagos state for the first phase of the project while it would be extended to other states in the next phases.
Commenting, Mr Biodun Akande, the Deputy Director, Planning, Research and Statistics, Oyo state ministry of health, said that the capacity building programme would improve data management process in Oyo state.
Akande added that the state just concluded the training for 140 data validators and has also embarked on regular monitoring and evaluation from state to health facilities level to ensure accurate and high quality FP data in the state.
He urged the participants from all the LGAs in the state to put the knowledge they acquired during the training session into practice for the state to maintain its lead position in FP data management.
One of the participants, Mrs Funmilayo Abodurin, the FP coordinator, Iddo LGA, Oyo State, said that the programme had exposed the participants on ways to generate accurate and high quality family planning data.
Abodurin noted the knowledge gained during the programme would be replicated to the facilities providers in the LGA on the best self injection counseling approaches to improve its acceptability and to generate quality data.
The capacity building programme featured technical sessions on the 2019 version of the FP register, group work on sample data using FP register and update on the DISC project among others.