Use of Traditional Family Planning Methods among Women of Child Bearing Age in Kwande LGA of Benue State, Nigeria

The family planning use has a multiplicity of health benefits such as preventing unplanned pregnancies, ensuring child spacing, reducing maternal and child mortality. In recent years, there has been an improvement in the provision of health facilities. Despite the improvement in science and technology that accompanied the establishment of the family planning unit across the state. With all these efforts, it has been observed that many women of childbearing age still cling to traditional family planning. This study also seeks to identify the socio-demographic characteristics of women that mostly use traditional family planning, various traditional family planning methods they use, the reasons for the preference of traditional family planning and the perceived effects of the traditional methods. The structured questionnaire was used to elicit information from 387 respondents and 50 participants for the in-depth interview to compliment the information from the quantitative data. The quantitative data involving descriptive and inferential statistics (Pearson correlation) was applied to interpret the result using SPSS. The study also revealed that women of childbearing age mostly used herbal medicine as a family planning method. In addition, the study revealed that effectiveness and trust of the method, no side effects, low cost as well as the availability of the method are the factors influencing the usage of traditional family planning in the area. The result of the study revealed that women of different educational qualification effectively utilized traditional family planning methods. This means that the educational qualifications of women have no significant influence on the use of traditional family planning method. The study recommends among others that women of childbearing age should be enlightened on the effect of modern family planning. The government should intensify its effort in making family planning units closer to the women. In addition, government and Non-governmental organisation should sponsor advanced research in the area to ascertain the effectiveness of the traditional family planning for better outlook, policy-making and implementation.