FamPlan as a strategic planning tool

The use of targets in national population policies and programs was a controversial issue at the International Conference on Population and Development and remains so. In Nigeria, the 2004 National Policy on Population for Sustainable Development establishes family planning targets; however, they are tools to monitor and evaluate implementation of the policy, rather than clinic quotas.

Nigeria's National Population Commission (NPC) is developing an implementation strategy for the National Policy and has used FamPlan (a component of the Spectrum suite of reproductive health policy models) to look at family planning requirements to achieve its targets. FamPlan is based on a proximate determinants methodology and is a tool to inform decisions about policy implementation.

NPC's FamPlan projections found that if Nigeria reaches the National Policy target of increasing the contraceptive prevalence rate by two percentage points per year from 2005 to 2035, the population growth rate would drop from 2.67 to 1.09% per annum, and the total population would be 238 million in 2035. The FamPlan analysis suggests that injectables and pills will be the dominant methods used by Nigerians in the future, implying that achieving greater accessibility to and affordability of injectables and pills will be key to meeting policy targets.

The FamPlan analysis underscores the importance of and challenges involved in meeting the goals of the Nigerian National Policy on Population for Sustainable Development, as well as the serious consequences of failing to reach them. Over time, FamPlan is a potentially powerful tool to monitor and evaluate policy implementation.