DAMILOLA OYEDELE writes in ALLAFRICA:
Abuja — Nigeria still ranks high the list of countries with high maternal and infant mortality rates with a ratio of 545 per 100,000 live births on the maternal mortality index and 75 per 1000 live births on the infant mortality index; these figures are from the UN World Population Prospects and the Institute for Health Metric Reports (2010).
Chairman of the National Population Commission (NPC), Chief Festus Odimegwu, who disclosed this while speaking at a press conference to commemorate this year’s World Population Day (WPD), added that the Federal Government had budgeted $3m annually to provide free family planning facilities for Nigerians.
Although some progress had been made since the release of the report, he said a lot more still needed to be done to prevent the avoidable deaths; stressing that only 58 per cent women had access to ante-natal care.
Odimegwu, who represented by the NPC Commissioner in the FCT, Mr. Sani Suleiman, outlined grim statistics of the health status of reproductive women aged between 15 and 49 in Nigeria. READ MORE.