Accra, Nov. 11, GNA - The First Lady Mrs. Theresa Kufuor on Tuesday called for the strengthening of partnerships aimed at funding and improving sexual and reproductive health programmes.

She noted that the public health sector could not attain targets of the nation alone and called on the private health sector to be a significant contributor to the vision of the health sector. The First Lady made the call in a speech read for her at the launch of a project dubbed: From Donorship to Ownership in Accra on Tuesday. The project, an advocacy initiative of the Planned Parenthood Association of Ghana (PPAG), is aimed at influencing national policy formulation, increase national, political and financial commitments to Sexual and Reproductive Health Rights (SRHR).

It has a purpose of fostering ownership and leadership of SRHR by government with the view to securing increased funding for SRHR policies.

The project funded through the European Union will run for one year. It is currently being implemented in Nigeria, Burkina Faso and The Gambia.

At the national level, the project seeks to increase public funds devoted to sexual and reproductive health, advocate new laws and policies to promote the provision of sexual reproductive health services and increase government's commitment to sexual reproductive health. Mrs Kufuor explained that though the level of collaboration among organizations in sexual and reproductive health issues left much to be desired, development partners have been instrumental in assisting the country in its efforts at building a healthy human resource for economic growth and development.

"With assistance from donors including UN agencies, USAID, DFID, JICA, DANIDA and others, HIV prevalence has gone down. It is unfortunate, however, to note that funding for reproductive health programmes is declining."

Reports indicate that in 2000, donor countries and agencies provided just about 2.6 billion dollars.

She called on stakeholders to focus on the challenges in the areas of significant increases in unintended pregnancies, unsafe abortions, unacceptable high rates of maternal morbidity and mortality and child mortality, among others.

Dr Richard Turkson, Member of PPAG's National Advocacy Coalition Family Planning, said SRH was longer a health issue but a development issue of major importance as the country gears towards a middle income status.

He said it was it was crucial that the nation took responsibility for its SRH programmes and adequately funded them adding that it was time to remove all bottlenecks on SRH which had become a threat to development.

Dr Turkson called for the inclusion of family planning commodities especially contraceptives in the NHIS and charged government to make it a priority as soon as possible. 11 Nov. 08