GITEGA, November 12th (ABP) – Families who have joined the family planning program contribute enormously to increased production in various sectors of national life, particularly in households. During interviews conducted by ABP in various localities in the province of Gitega (the political capital), the people contacted affirmed that family planning plays an important role in increasing household production and in safeguarding peace and security in the country. Anne Marie Nduwayezu, a woman with 5 children from the Mubuga zone in the commune and province of Gitega, warmly thanked the “Abaremeshakiyago” community health workers and the staff of the Ministry of Public Health, who are constantly raising awareness among households in the process of having children, to join the family planning program en masse, using modern contraceptive methods such as implants, condoms, tablets, uterine inputs, injections and tubal ligation to space births. She pointed out that all those methods are available at health facilities.
Nduwayezu reported that, before using the implant method, she had given birth to 3 children in less than four years, and that during those years she no longer contributed to the family’s development. “I fell pregnant again five months after the birth of the eldest child. I wasn’t contributing to the family’s development,” Nduwayezu said. She pointed out that her eldest child was affected by marasmus, while the family did not have sufficient means to buy nutritional food for children. That is when a child needs to be sufficiently nourished for the first three years (1000 days) to avoid being unfit for the labor market, as nutritionists indicate. She pointed out that currently, with birth spacing, all is well and their children are in good health. With that in mind, she urged families to embrace family planning methods en masse for sustainable development.
Gaspard Gatoto from Colline Kimanama asserts that birth spacing guarantees peace and security in the community, and particularly in households. He gives the example of Batwa families who have joined the family planning program. He points out that conflicts used to persist in those families, with their children taking drugs at an early age. He points out that, for the time being, cases of theft on the hill have diminished sufficiently.
That was affirmed by Rosalie Nahimana and her husband Léonard Macumi, parents of 6 children, 4 boys and two girls. Both reported that their family is doing well after using the injection method, because, they all explained, the spacing is 3 to 4 years for the last two children, while the longest spacing for the first four children was between 6 months and a year. They call on the Batwa to adhere to contraceptive methods to limit births and ensure the development of their families and the country, taking into account the vision of a Burundi emerging in 2040 and developed in 2060.
Marceline Nahayo, a woman with two children living on the Kabanga hill in the Kibimba zone of the Giheta commune, says she started using birth control methods as soon as her first child was born in 2015, and gave birth to her second child in 2020. The eldest is in his 1st year of basic school. She reports that she is carrying the pregnancy of the third child and that all her children are doing well, and that she contributes effectively to household development as a seller of tomatoes, cabbages and bananas at the Bihanga market.
Nahayo encourages community health workers to redouble their efforts to raise awareness among the people in order to limit births, with the aim of ensuring the country’s development. To ensure the enormous success of that program, she calls on the administration and the churches to make their contribution by raising awareness among families in the process of procreating, to change their mentality in order to give birth to children for whom they can assume the needs.
“The population must understand that the country will not develop in a sustainable way, once its population does not massively adhere to the family planning program. The churches must also understand that their teachings against family planning are at the root of the poor results recorded by the health structures”, explained Nahayo. She hopes that once all women are using those methods, it will be very easy to achieve the 2040-2060 vision.
Referring to statistics from the World Health Organization “WHO” published on www.who.int in 2021, out of 1.9 billion women of childbearing age (15-49) worldwide, 874 million were using modern methods of contraception, out of 1.1 billion who needed family planning services. At the same time, 164 million women had no access to the contraception they need. In 2022, the contraceptive prevalence rate, all methods combined, was estimated at 65% worldwide and the rate of use of modern methods at 58.7% for women married or in couples. The same site indicates that the proportion of women of childbearing age using modern contraceptive methods remained at around 77% worldwide between 2015 and 2022, but that that figure rose from 52% to 58% in sub-Saharan Africa.
In Burundi, the quarterly bulletin of the national health information system indicates that new acceptors of contraceptive methods declined nationally from the second quarter of 2023 to the fourth quarter of 2024, with the trend continuing downwards until the second quarter of 2024.
For example, new contraceptive users in 2023 were 127,064 in the first quarter, 137,976 in the second quarter, 137186 in the third quarter and 126884 in the fourth quarter. In 2024, 129,116 people were recorded in the first quarter and 132,947 in the second. That may affect the effective application of the government’s commitments, in particular Vision 2040-2060.