Estimating unmet need for contraception by district within Ghana: An application of small-area estimation techniques

Abstract

The importance of meeting the unmet need for contraception is nowhere more urgent than in the countries of sub-Saharan Africa, where the fertility decline is stalling and total unmet need exceeds 30 per cent among married women. In Ghana, where fertility levels vary considerably, demographic information at sub-national level is essential for building effective family planning programmes. We used small-area estimation techniques, linking data from the 2003 Ghana Demographic and Health Survey to the 2000 Ghana Population and Housing Census, to derive district-level estimates of contraceptive use and unmet need for contraception. The results show considerable variation between districts in contraceptive use and unmet need. The prevalence of contraceptive use varies from 4.1 to 41.7 per cent, while that of the use of modern methods varies from 4.0 to 34.8 per cent. The findings identify districts where family planning programmes need to be strengthened.

Keywords:

• contraceptive use
• unmet need
• demand satisfied
• district-level estimates
• small-area estimation
• Demographic and Health Survey
• Census
• Ghana

Notes

1. The authors would like to thank the UK Economic and Social Research Council, who funded this research (Grant number: RES-167-25-0343. The authors are also grateful to the Ghana Statistical Service and Measure DHS for providing us with the data.

2. Fiifi Amoako Johnson, Sabu S. Padmadas, Zoe Matthews, and Nyovani J. Madise are at the Division of Social Statistics and Demography, Centre for Global Health, Population, Poverty and Policy, Faculty of Social and Human Sciences, University of Southampton, Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK. E-mail: [email protected]. Hukum Chandra is at the Indian Agricultural Statistics Research Institute (IASRI), New Delhi, India.