By Lydia Kukua Asamoah, GNA
Accra, July 12, GNA – Ms Florence Hagan,
Greater Accra Regional Director of the National Population Council (NPC)
Secretariat, has appealed to the Government to pay more attention to the
Council, to help it implement its mandate more effectively.
She, especially, appealed to the Government,
to reconstitute the NPC Council that had not been re-constituted over two years
now.
“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 that is globally observed on July 11, every year.
The NPC also called on the 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, its 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.
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 on the theme: “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