Kano SBCC committee for child birth spacing reviews progress

The Challenge Initiative (TCI), in collaboration with the Kano state government, over the weekend, held a workshop which reviewed the progress and challenges being faced by the Social and Behavioral Change Communication (SBCC) committee for Child Birth Spacing (CBS) in Kano state in the last three months, as well as developed an action plan for the committee.

It would be recalled that the implementation of TCI in Nigeria commenced in 2016 with the aim of accelerating demand-driven participation and creating a national family planning movement in the country. However, the Kano state SBCC committee on CBS was inaugurated in 2018.

While speaking on the progress made by the Kano SBCC committee since 2018, Musa Sufi, state programme coordinator for TCI Kano, said some of the strategies adopted by the committee included supporting community mobilization, which entailed a house-to-house enlightenment and sensitization campaign targeted at enlightening married women and men on the importance of CBS. Others, he said, were radio programmes, sensitizations visit to religious organizations as well as youth engagement activities on CBS.

While speaking on the challenges being faced by the committee, Hassan Gama, the executive director of Friends of the Community Organisation, said: “Some people still misunderstand the concept of Child Birth Spacing. Some are still of the opinion that those who practice family planning experience complications  but they don’t understand that having children that someone cannot take care of is itself a problem.”

Participants at the meeting agreed there was a high demand for CBS commodities in Kano; however, there were no adequate resources to cater for the CBS needs of the people. According to one of the participants, Mainasara Abdulsalam, “People’s complaints about child birth spacing are not about its side effects instead the unprofessional attitude of healthcare workers.”

The Challenge Initiative (TCI) is a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-funded program working in the area of improving access to family planning and childbirth spacing services to women towards achieving targets of Family Planning 2020 campaign across four hubs of the world: Kenya, India, Senegal and Nigeria.