“We appreciate this project of distributing female condoms to our community,” said Martha Moyo, a community health care worker from Mvundlana village.
“It is good for the youths who have tended to engage in unprotected sex. I hope the Ministry of Health will intensify female condom distribution in rural communities as our young people are more vulnerable than their informed counterparts in urban areas,” she added.
A female student at Tsholotsho High School concurred that female condoms work to their advantage.
“When you ask men to use condoms they tend to claim that they have none. But now that we have female condoms, it works to our advantage as we are in a position to make independent decisions,” she said.
A local chief said: “Our children nowadays are sleeping around carelessly. I believe this project came at a right time and I urge all mothers out there to teach and encourage their female children to use these condoms as it the only way to rescue us from the scourge of sexual transmitted diseases and teenage pregnancies.”
Recently, ZNFPC, a parastatal under the Ministry of Health and Child Welfare, was mandated to co-ordinate the provision of family services and currently operates at 13 clinics in the country’s 10 provinces.
A recent survey by ZNFPC revealed that the supply of female condoms from the national distribution centre in the first quarter of 2013 was 1, 047,832 compared to 847,008 pieces during the same period last year.
ZNFPC Marketing and Communications Manager, Simion Chikwizo, was recently quoted in the media saying that the lack of resources was hindering health outreach services in rural areas.
“Rural women are responding very slowly to female condoms because there are a few social mobilisation and outreach services which are taking place in communities. These activities are meant to drum up support for people to have a buy into the product,” said Chikwizo.
He added that government had not been providing enough funds to enable ZNFPC to carry out its mandate in rural areas.
Chikwizo said it was expensive to implement advocacy campaigns as it involved advertising in the media, production of promotional materials such as posters and pamphlets and the use of multimedia strategies.
Post published in: News