Kathmandu, March 18

A two-day national conference on family planning organised by Family Health Division, Department of Health Services, kicked off here today.

Suggestions and recommendations from stakeholders will be collected to increase access to modern contraceptive methods during the conference.

Nearly 400 stakeholders from UN agencies, governmental and non-governmental agencies, academia, professional groups, volunteers, family planning supervisors from 77 districts, health chiefs from all seven provinces are participating in the conference.

Director of Family Health Division Dr RP Bichha said the recommendations of stakeholders would help formulate roadmap for family planning. We organised this conference to collect suggestions from stakeholders and analyse the core problem due to which the number of women with unmet needs is increasing in the country,” he added. Women with unmet need are those who are fecund and sexually active but are not using any method of contraception.

In the year 2011, around 43 per cent married couples were using modern contraceptive methods. However, the country has not seen significant increase in terms of use of modern contraceptives thereafter.

“Despite of our efforts, we are not able to meet the needs of unmet need groups, especially, adolescents and migrant workers,” he said, adding that the conference would help formulate separate policy for different unmet need groups in the country.

Unmet need for family planning is high among adolescents. Of the total people with unmet needs, 34 per cent are adolescents while more than 500,000 migrant workers have unmet needs for family planning. “We will implement the recommendation and suggestion from next year,” said Dr Bichha.

Inaugurating the conference, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Health and Population Upendra Yadav said that the conference would help address the challenges of reaching the unmet need groups and increase contraceptive prevalence rate in the country.