The Chairman, the National Population Commission, Nasir Isa-Kwarra, has warned that unintended pregnancy is contributing to the rise in extreme poverty in Nigerian households, as it disrupts women’s jobs and earnings.
He gave this warning at the launch of the 2022 State of the World Population Report in Abuja.
He added that unintended pregnancies particularly, among teenagers and adolescent girls, were a major health concern, as they were associated with high morbidity and mortality of both mother and child.
According to him, unintended pregnancy “promotes and sustains extreme poverty at household level as it interrupts women’s jobs and earnings.”
Speaking on the efforts of the government to prevent unintended pregnancies, the NPC chairman said the government had shown commitment to ensuring the fundamental rights of women and girls were exercised.
While presenting the report, the Deputy Representative of the United Nations Population Fund in Nigeria, Erika Goldson, reiterated that reducing unintended pregnancies was crucial to achieving Sustainable Development Goals.
The Minister of Health, Dr. Osagie Ehanire, who also spoke at the launch, said Nigeria’s rapid population growth hindered economic growth.
He said, “Nigeria’s population is currently projected at about 214 million persons due to a high population growth rate of 3.2 per cent and a high total fertility rate of 5.3 children per woman.
“The rapid population growth has an adverse effect on the quality of life and hinders the achievement of socio-economic development goals of the country.”
In its report titled, ‘Closing Gaps, Increasing Opportunities: A Diagnostic on Women’s Economic Empowerment in Nigeria’, the World Bank estimated the cost of gender gaps to the Nigerian economy as $9.3bn.
According to the Washington-based bank, this loss was equivalent to 2.3 per cent of the country’s overall gross domestic product.
In the report, the World Bank said that women lacked as many opportunities as men in the area of employment, which had affected their productivity in the country.
The report read in part, “The total estimated forgone earnings stemming from gender gaps in agricultural productivity, firm profits, and wage earnings amount to $9.3bn, equivalent to 2.3 per cent of overall gross domestic product. This is a lower bound estimate, which corresponds to the amount of additional earnings generated if every woman’s productivity, profits, and wage level were equalized with those of men. Using GDP multipliers, which take into account potential spillover effects across sectors of the economy, the costs could be as high as $22.9bn, or 5.8 per cent of overall GDP.”
The World Bank stressed the need to close existing gender gaps and empower women economically.
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