State Team Leader, National Urban and Reproductive Health Initiative, Kwara State, Mr. Aliyu Sadiq, has said  Nigeria still has high records of maternal and infant mortality.

Speaking during a media advocacy  summit for media executives in Ilorin on Tuesday, he stated that maternal mortality was about  980 per 100,000, while  infant mortality was between 50 and 103 per 1,000.

He added that children under five-year mortality was between  50 and 185 per 1,000, while neonatal mortality was 50 out of 1,000.

Sadiq, who noted that some of the deaths were avoidable, called for collaborative efforts of all stakeholders to reduce the trend.

He identified some of the challenges of family planning in the country to include inadequate service  providers to man service points, need for retraining of service  providers to meet the changing need of family planning and obsolete  equipment.

Another constraint, according to Sadiq, is the inadequate monitoring of family planning services due to logistics problem.

He stated that policy makers needed to be educated on the realities of mortality and other health concerns in the country.

"Members of the public need to be informed on the help they need, why they need the help, where to get the help, what the help can do in their lives and who they should be talking to," he said.

According to him, family planning services can avert high-risk pregnancies and reduce maternal mortality rate.

"We should help our women to live healthy because when the woman is well, the family is well," Sadiq said.

He, however, urged Nigerians, particularly women, to avail themselves of available helpful information about their health needs.