UNFPA to focus on humanitarian, fistula, etc, in 2016

The UN Population Fund (UNFPA) has pledged to focus on humanitarian support services, Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) and fistula issues in Nigeria in 2016.
The Fund’s Assistant Country Representative, Mr Osaretin Adonri, disclosed this in Abuja on Tuesday at the ongoing UNFPA Abuja Office 2015 Annual Review and 2016 Annual Work Plan (AWP) Development Meeting.
Other intervention areas by UNFPA include teenage pregnancies, HIV, safe space, Gender Based Violence (GBV), family planning, girl child education, said Adonri.
The assistant representative, who said there would be drastic reduction in donor contributions in the coming year, noted that the Fund would focus more on support services to tackle the challenges.
He added that in the North Central states of the federation and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), the Fund would dwell more on policy dialogue, advocacy and policy formulation.
He explained that in the North Eastern part of the country, the Fund would focus on humanitarian and safe space issues, with emphasis on women empowerment.
In the North West, he said, the Fund would concentrate on teenage pregnancies, girl-child education and fistula, stressing that communities would be mobilised to national fistula centre ‘’because the centre is currently operating below capacity’’.
He noted that UNFPA would collaborate with its focal persons at the Federal Ministry of Health to conduct as many outreach programmes as possible to tackle the issue of FGM.
He said that the issues of teenage pregnancies, Gender Based Violence (GBV) and FGM would be the Fund’s areas of focus in 2016 in the South South, South West and South Eastern parts of the country.
He, however, emphasised the need for clarity of communication and advocacy activities by the Fund’s Implementing Partners (IPs), saying it was only when the organisation could account for its spending that the big donor organisations could contribute money to it.
The official said: ‘’We (UNFPA) want to be able to communicate and adequately justify how we spend the money given us to donor organisations in order to make them to give us more money to do more.’’
He advised the Fund’s IPs to work on a 50 per cent draft work plan for the coming year, ‘’because we do not know how the budget for the year will look like’’.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that about 45 IPs, including 24 MDAs and 21 NGOs, are expected to produce their respective draft work plans for 2016.