Almost all the major religious practices in West Africa has components that support the practice of family planning.

As a result, the Health Policy Project (HPP) in collaboration with leaders of the major religions practiced in the West African sub-region have come together to develop an advocacy tools for the promotion of family planning.

This came to light at the formal opening of an international end of project review meeting of the first phase of the HPP in West Africa in Accra.

The five years project was funded by the United States International Development Agency and implemented by Futures Group, a civil society organisation in collaboration with some local and international implementers.

It was aimed at helping West African countries to adopt national family planning policies and providing budgetary allocations for their implementation.

This is expected to provide easy access to effective family planning services to many people in the West Africa, which has some of the fastest growing populations in the world.

This is expected to help reduce the high health risk suffered by many women in the West African sub-region as a result of unplanned pregnancies and poor birth spacing which often results in high maternal deaths and death of children.

The project therefore hope to help address these issues and provide mothers easy access to effective contraceptives to enable them stay alive to contribute towards the social economic development of their countries.

The project also aimed at helping vulnerable people living with HIV to overcome discrimination and stigmatisation to access health care to stay alive and help reduce the spread of the disease in the region.

Among the key achievements of the project is to get nine Francophone countries in West Africa to come out with costed national family planning programmes for the first time.

The project was able to develop tools to convince policy makers to adopt family planning as part of their national health programmes and backed them with budgetary allocations.

The participants included representatives of the nine Francophone countries that signed the Ouagadougou partnership including Togo, Burkina Faso, Benin, Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Guinea, Cameroon, and Cote D’Voire.

Ghana and Nigeria are expected to share their experience in the implementation of the project.