Her Excellency Mrs Samira Bawumia attended the Family Planning Summit, which took place in London on 11 July 2017, in respect of a joint invitation from the UK Department for International Department, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the United Nations Population Fund.
At the summit, Mrs Bawumia, together with the Deputy Health Minister, Hon. Tina Mensah, and the Director of the Family Health Division of the Ghana Health Service, Dr Patrick Aboagye, had a meeting with Rory Stewart, UK Minister of State for Africa at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to discuss pertinent issues in the Ghanaian health sector.
The conference was organised to conven the global community on rights-based family planning, and galvanise new commitments and new solutions to move closer the shared Family Planning 2020 goal of enabling an additional 120 million women and girls to use voluntary modern contraception by 2020.
Mrs Bawumia also lead a brief discussion on advocating for Adolescent Health: Empowerment and Inclusion at a breakfast meeting at the offices of the Palladium Group, a global leader in the design, development and delivery of Positive Impact. Her presentation was based on the Ghanaian experience drawing lessons more broadly from the National Adolescent Health and Development Programme of the Ghana Health Service and the work being done under the Ghana Adolescent Reproductive Health Programme funded by DFID Ghana. The focus of the discussion was drawn from the London FP2020 Summit theme of Empowerment of Adolescent Girls which covers the issues of investment in education, retention in school, provision of comprehensive sexually education, provision of information and counselling including use of technology to deliver messages to young people, and access to sexual reproductive health services, including contraceptives.
