Women’s employment and family planning in rural Uganda

ABSTRACT

Despite impressive progress in increasing contraceptive use in developing countries during recent decades, the uptake has lagged behind in Africa. One of the most critical factors in raising the use of contraception is women’s employment status. This study analyzed the link between women’s employment and family planning in rural Uganda and addressed shortcomings in the literature by using nationally representative panel data from the 2010 and 2012 rounds of the Uganda National Panel Survey for 800 women aged 15–49 years, and estimating heterogeneous effects for different types of employment and across socio-economic characteristics. Employment was not associated with greater use of modern contraceptives, but off-farm wage-employed women were more likely to use traditional contraception. The correlation of employment was strongest for women who had reached their desired fertility status, but became insignificant for poorer women who lived in remote areas. However, likely due to the ineffectiveness of traditional methods, off-farm wage employment was not associated with greater spacing between births. Our findings implied that providing rural employment opportunities for women is insufficient to increase the uptake of modern contraceptives. To enhance the effectiveness of family planning programs, health-care officers should target off-farm wage-employed women to address their unmet contraceptive needs.

KEYWORDS:

• Contraceptive use
• employment
• family planning
• fertility
• Sub-Saharan Africa
• Uganda

Acknowledgments

The author wants to thank Miet Maertens and seminar participants at KU Leuven for their useful comments on a previous version of this paper. This research was funded by a postdoctoral fellowship from Research Foundation Flanders (FWO).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The data are publicly available and can be retrieved from http://surveys.worldbank.org/lsms/programs/integrated-surveys-agriculture-ISA.

2. Other survey rounds were organized in 2011 and 2014, but we did not use them because of insufficient time interval with 2010 and because 1/3 of the original households were replaced in the 2014 sample.

3. A small number of observations (14) used both traditional and modern contraception. They were classified under the third level ‘modern contraception’ as the second level entailed women who only used traditional contraception.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek [Post-doctoral fellowship].