Population Council appeals for more attention from Government

Population Council appeals for more attention from Government

By Lydia Kukua Asamoah, GNA

Accra, July 13, GNA - Ms Florence Hagan, Greater Accra Regional Director of the National Population Council (NPC) Secretariat, has appealed to Government to pay more attention to the Council, to help implement its mandate more effectively.

She also urged Government to reconstitute the NPC Council, which had not been re-constituted over the past two years.

“This is having an effect on operations of the organisation mandated by Act 485 (1994) to advise the Government on population and its related matters,” Ms Hagan said in a message to mark World Population Day, which is globally observed on July 11, every year.

The NPC also called on Government to assist in providing the necessary support towards full implementation of the Ghana Family Planning Costed Implementation Plan to enable the country to reach its goals of increasing the modern contraceptive prevalence rate (CPR) to 30 per cent amongst married women and 40 per cent amongst unmarried but sexually active women by 2020.

Ms Hagan urged the country to stay more committed to obligations under the Sustainable Development Goals and the AU’s Strategic Framework for the socio-economic transformation of African continent called (Agenda 2063) to ensure that population issues were well integrated into development planning processes at all levels.

“We have to factor population size, age and sex structure, spatial distribution, its density and issues with regard to in-migration and out -migration seriously into development processes in order to allocate commensurate resources needed in addressing them.

“For development is about people and for the people and it is about people having options to choose from or improvement in life's choices."

She disclosed that Ghana has a Total Fertility Rate (TFR) of 4.2 (GDHS, 2014), while at the regional level, it varied from 2.8 in Greater Accra Region to as high as 6.6 births per woman in the Northern Region.

She said other population target indicators were still below average while the life expectancy for Ghana is less than 65 years, as indicated by the UN Human Development Index of 2016.

The national contraceptive prevalence rate for modern method is 22 per cent and for any method is 27 per cent, while for rural and urban, it is 27.5 and 25.8 per cent for any method and 24.6 and 19.8 for modern method respectively.

The World Population day is marked every year to focus attention on the role and the importance of population as a factor in the development processes.

The global theme for this year was "Family Planning is a Human Right", while the national celebrations was themed: "Family Planning is a Human Right: An Imperative to Sustainable Economic Development".

Ghana’s launch was held at Sokode Gbogame in the Volta Region.

GNA

Read Full Story