In 2021, I was working with an NGO preparing for their annual family planning outreach in a local community. Before the event, I was handed a stack of pamphlets to review. Something felt off as I read through them. Every point, statistic, and call to action was directed at women. The language, the imagery, even the suggested conversations assumed that the person responsible for family planning was the woman.
I went to my supervisor and asked whether men would be included. The answer was not one I could work with, so I pushed further and suggested to the PR team that both genders be included. If this were truly about family planning, it could not realistically exclude half of the family. After some back-and-forth, I was told to stick to my assignment. The outreach was women-focused.
On the day, among the full crowd of attendees, I counted three men. This was the result of a system that was never designed to include them, and a culture that had long since decided their absence was acceptable.
Family planning in Nigeria has been framed as a shared responsibility for decades, but in practice, it functions as a gendered one. Women carry the physical, emotional, and social weight of contraception while men remain largely peripheral to both the conversation and the action.
Since the 1980s, when family planning initiatives began gaining ground in Nigeria, most interventions were designed around women, largely because they are the direct users of contraceptive methods. That logic made sense at the level of implementation, but it gradually created a system where responsibility settled entirely on women. Over time, that approach hardened into expectation.
See also: Women Have Been Managing the Pain of Contraception for Decades—Men Get a Gel.
Where Culture and Misinformation Intersect
The absence of men from family planning is often explained as disinterest, but it is more accurately a reflection of how cultural expectations, masculinity, and misinformation reinforce one another.
In Nigerian communities, a man’s identity has historically been tied to his fertility. Fathering many children is a marker of status, virility, and in many religious contexts, divine blessing.
In states like Niger, Zamfara, and Kebbi, large families are a source of communal pride. Family planning in that framework can feel less like a practical decision and more like a rejection of identity. That is why conversations around contraception so often become negotiations of power rather than exercises in shared responsibility.
This dynamic explains why the available options for men remain so severely underused. Condoms are the most accessible male contraceptive method, requiring no medical procedure and widely available across the country, yet consistent use remains low.
Vasectomy is a safe, minimally invasive, reversible option that carries even heavier stigma. Many Nigerian men associate it with a loss of sexual potency, despite the fact that the procedure does not affect sexual function in any way.
The myth persists because it feeds on the same cultural logic that made family planning a woman’s job in the first place. To voluntarily alter the body associated with fertility is, in that worldview, to surrender something irreplaceable.
Beyond the options themselves, misinformation shapes how men engage with the entire conversation. The belief that family planning is a Western agenda designed to reduce African populations is widespread and persistent. It gives men an ideological justification for resistance that goes beyond personal preference, positioning non-participation as cultural self-preservation rather than what it actually is: an abdication of shared responsibility.
See also: “Should I Help My Fiancé Pay My Bride Price?” — The Dilemma of a Nigerian Woman
What the Data Already Shows
According to the 2018 Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey, 71 per cent of Nigerian men do not use any modern contraceptive method. Nearly 20 per cent believed contraception is a woman’s business, and 38 per cent believed that women who use contraceptives may become promiscuous. Despite years of awareness campaigns, progress has been slow, with experts consistently pointing to male resistance and lack of involvement as a primary factor.
Data from the United Nations Population Fund shows that Nigeria’s fertility rate remains at approximately 5.3 births per woman, with nearly half of the population under the age of fifteen. Organisations like UNICEF have repeatedly warned that without wider adoption of voluntary family planning, the country risks deepening existing challenges around poverty, food insecurity, and access to healthcare. In 2023, Nigeria accounted for nearly 29 percent of all maternal deaths worldwide, an estimated 75,000 women dying in childbirth in a single year, one death every seven minutes. A quarter of the estimated 10.3 million annual pregnancies in Nigeria are unintended, and more than half of those end in abortion, mostly under unsafe conditions. The contraceptive prevalence rate among married women sits at just 17 percent, with even lower rates in rural areas.
Behind these numbers are women who never really had a say in their own reproductive health.
Mrs Regina Ideh, a nurse based in Ekiti State, sees this dynamic in practice. “In most towns, family planning is still seen as an attempt to reduce the African population. Some women actually need space in between births or even limit it to a specific number of kids, but they are scared of their husbands or community backlash.”
A significant proportion of men are absent because the current arrangement, where women manage contraception, and men remain uninvolved, suits a particular desire to regulate women’s reproductive behaviour rather than share responsibility for it.
See also: Elowell Max Survey: 4 in 10 Women Have Tried to Change Their Bodies Because of Social Media
The Weight Women Are Carrying Alone
Josephine is a 32-year-old mother of four in Somolu, Lagos. After their fourth child, she tried to raise the conversation about family planning with her husband. “He thinks of it as a forbidden statement. Things are already stretched physically and financially, but he insists that there is no limit to what God can provide.”
She did not raise the issue again. Instead, she began exploring contraceptive options on her own, weighing the side effects, the cost, and carrying the risk of being found out.
The options she was weighing are not trivial. The IUD, the pill, the hormonal implant, these are medical interventions with real physical consequences. Hormonal contraceptives can cause mood changes, irregular bleeding, weight fluctuation, and reduced libido. These are side effects that women research, access, and manage entirely alone while their partners remain unaware and uninvolved.
Doctor Julius, a medical practitioner in Edo State, is direct about where the problem sits. “It is a matter of mindset, and it is concerning. Because in most homes the men are the decision makers, hence where the restraints come from. Men have a vital role in family planning because they have the responsibility to care about the health of their spouses.”
I still think about those three men in the crowd at the 2021 outreach because their absence was unremarkable to everyone around me. Expected, even.
Family planning should not be a woman’s burden to carry alone. It is a shared responsibility that has been outsourced by default to women.
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