Awareness, Utilization and Attitude of Married Men towards Family Planning: The Case of Men Living within the Nkwen Health Area, Bamenda

Family planning in the past year was thought to be a woman's prerogative, consequently most studies on family planning focused on women as the subject of interest. However, men's participation in crucial to the success of family planning programs and women's empowerment. Hence, this study assessed the awareness and attitude of married men towards family planning. This employed a community based cross - sectional descriptive design using a structured household questionnaire to collect data from 99 male study participants. Data was analyzed using IBM SPSS version20.0 and results obtained showed that most of the men were within the age range of 18 - 35 years (46.5%) who were employed (69.7%) and had 1 - 5 children (46.5%). Most of the married men were aware of family planning (85.9%) with the main source of information being wives (35.3%). Also most of the men had used a family planning method (63.6%) with majority of them using condoms (63.0%). Most men had an overall positive attitude (50.0%) towards family planning with 40% being neutral and 10% with a negative attitude. In conclusion, the level of awareness of family planning amongst married men living within the Nkwen health area was high (85.9%), 63.6% had used a family planning method and 50% had a positive attitude towards family planning.