Government and the Catholic Church are in new talks to agree on how the much-needed family planning services can be delivered forward.
Nearly a week after last month’s Minister of Health, Dr. Diane Gashumba, said at a Parliament forum that the Catholic Church was frustrating efforts to expand family planning, Prof. Anastase Shyaka, Minister of Local Government, called a meeting at his office in Kigali with all the Catholic Church .
Resolutions from that meeting, which took place on 27 June 2019, suggest that talks between the two parties be resumed to agree on how to proceed with the provision of health services, including family planning, in medical facilities owned by the Catholic .
Bishop Philippe Rukamba, president of the Catholic Church Episcopal Conference in Rwanda, confirmed to The New Times on Friday that talks on the subject were revived with the government.
“What is important right now is for people to know that we are in a dialogue and once we are done with the talks, we will come up with a clear agreement,” he said in a telephone interview.
One of the meeting’s resolutions at the Ministry for Local Government was that an agreement between the government and the Catholic Church on hospital management and health service delivery needs to be reviewed as soon as possible for a new agreement to be reached.
“In the current agreement we have many provisions, from use of medicines to the management of staff and infrastructure, and in the ongoing talks we will also discuss about the provision of family planning services,” Rukamba said in the interview.
However, the same conference decided that health facilities run by the Catholic Church can continue to provide family planning services, which exclude the provision of artificial contraceptives for birth control.
The church, which runs about one- third of the country’s hospitals and clinics, but with most health care providers at government-paid facilities, allows only natural methods of birth control on its premises.
That implies that patients needing artificial contraceptives like condoms, implants, or injection need to go somewhere else.
Speaking at a parliamentary advisory conference last month on family planning in Kigali, Minister Gashumba said she was concerned about the ongoing attitude of the Catholic Church towards family planning, suggesting that two opposing structures were emerging in the nation when it comes to offering healthcare facilities in that region.
She said the first strategy was to use dialog to inform the Church about the essence of all family planning facilities, including artificial contraceptives for birth control, but it has refused and only enables natural contraception.
Her wish was for a country- wide law to be implemented to guarantee that all health facilities provide people with accessible family planning services..
It is that outcry by the Minister of Health that apparently sparked fresh talks between the government and the church.
Bishop Rukamba said that when the talks were to be concluded there was no deadline, but stressed that dialog is very important because, without it, people begin to be confrontational, which is not necessary..
Rwanda is one of the countries that in recent years have made impressive gains in family planning, reducing the fertility rate between 2000 and 2015 from 5.8 to 4.2 children per woman.
The nation also saw the use of contemporary techniques of contraception increase over the same period from 4% to 48%..
But there is still a long way to go given that Rwanda is one of the continent’s most densely populated nations, a threat to domestic development goals.
