The National Population Commission (NPC) says the country’s high population figure is influenced by its high fertility rate which is about 5.3 children per women.
The Chairman of the commission, Mr Nasir Kwarra, made the assertion in Abuja at the opening session of a seven-day training of interviewers for the 2022 fertility and health expectation programme.
The training of the interviewers was organised in collaboration with the University of Bristol, Federal Ministry of Health and National Bureau of Statistic (NBS).
The chairman added that low percentage of contraceptive usage of 17 per cent among married women was also responsible for the rapid growth of Nigeria population.
According to him, the training of the interviewer which will run from April 4 to April 10 will assist the survey scheduled to hold in five states of the federation.
The states include Akwa ibom, Bauchi, Borno, Kano and Oyo respectively.
He said that the rapid growth could be an asset or a liability depending on government policies and programme.
He said that policies must be formulated and implemented from an informed point of view to check the situation.
According to him, the fertility and health expectation survey, a sample survey, will complement data from censuses such as the planned 2022 Nigeria Population and Housing Census.
”This will contribute to the reservoir of data available for government,” he said.
He said that the survey would also help to make informed decisions about the population, adding that the 2022 fertility and health expectation survey was aimed at collecting data.
Kwarra said that the survey would collect data on the subjective beliefs regarding contraception of a representative sample of women who are at risk of unwanted pregnancy in the five study states.
He added that the data collected would be use to estimate a model of demand for contraception which would incorporates a wide array of supply and demand-side factors to quantify the relative importance of different factors.
”It will help to design the next step of the research project, namely a randomised controlled community trial aiming to narrow the gap between female fertility intentions and contraceptive use in the study sample,” he said.
Kwarra said that it would also help to collect quantity data on the strength of women’s and men’s desire to avoid pregnancy.
He added that the information would be used by government and partners to effectively plan intervention programme on reproductive health care.
He explained that the survey would be conducted in 400 clusters enumerated areas in the selected states, with women from age 18 to 44, married or living with a partner in a monogamous or polygamous union.
Kwarra said that the commission was expected to interview about 5, 750 women and 2,875 partners during this survey, adding that, effective management of the population was not an option but a necessity.
The chairman said that Nigeria’s population, which is about 216 million is currently projected to hit 400 million by the year 2050.
He, however, said that the commission was committed to generating reliable data for sustainable development.
According to him, all the necessary steps have been put in place to make sure that the 2022 fertility and health expectation survey is successful.
Dr Christine Valente, Principal Investigator, University of Bristol, stated that the university was involved in the research to weigh different policies to know the one that would be better for the country.
She said that one out of every four women in Sub-Sahara Africa who said they did not want to get pregnant or have any child within a period of time was not using any form of modern contraceptive to guard against it.
“To improve this understanding, Bristol University has joined forces with NPC for sensitisation and the idea is to go beyond the qualitative.
“We are also partnering to determine the outcome- if policy X is used instead of policy Y, or if both policies are used; our determination is to get a better result, collect data on subjective beliefs regarding contraception of representative sample.
“We are also out to document the beliefs and identify mis-calibrated, use the estimated model parameters to predict the effect of various methods, collect quantitative but nuanced data on the strength of women and men desires to avoid pregnancy.
“We will as well test whether women in our study sample are more likely to report desire,’’ Valente said.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the workshop drew participants from the National Bureau of Statistics, Federal Ministry of Health and African Health Budget Network. (NAN)
