Nigeria Population Policy and Family Planning

Family planning is one of the major components in the Nigeria Population Policy (NPP). Family planning services are practices to control unplanned pregnancy. Unplanned pregnancies sometime result in abortions by untrained personnel which consequently lead to morbidity and mortality. On the other hand unplanned pregnancies give rise to high fertility. This is where Malthus theory of population comes in. Malthus stated that there will be disequilibrium between population and food supply. This implies that population will increase in geometric progression while food supply will increase in arithmetic progression and positive and preventive checks were suggested. Positive checks are elements visible to influence or increase mortality rate and low life expectancy such as: war, famine and poor working conditions while the preventive checks are elements visible to reduce fertility such as: moral abstinence and contraception. This is the more reason why Nigerian government adopted Malthus theory to formulate her first population policy in 1988 to reduce fertility rate, population growth, proportion of early marriage and infant mortality rate. However, failure in achieving most its objectives led to its review in 2004. Several reasons were posited for the shortcoming of the NPP. The underlying reason for the ineffectiveness of the NPP was failure to consider social and cultural diversities in Nigeria. The reviewed NPP in 2004 was aimed at reducing the national population growth rate, total fertility rate (TFR) and increase utilization of family planning services among Nigerians. In this paper to enhance the utilization of family planning services in order to achieve the objective