Family Planning

  • Women’s, reproductive, infant, and child health

    After years of improvement, the slowing pace of progress across many reproductive, maternal, newborn, and child health and nutrition outcomes has demonstrated that some populations are particularly challenging to reach with life-saving products, programs, and interventions. In general, the public health community has found it difficult to define and describe these hard-to-reach populations because there…

  • Who actualizes postpartum contraceptive intentions? A trajectory cluster analysis

    Contraceptive intention is an important woman-centered indicator for family planning. Yet, few studies have examined the determinants of women or couples actualizing their contraceptive intentions. We leverage panel data from the Performance Monitoring for Action (PMA) survey in Ethiopia to examine these dynamics among a pregnancy cohort, over the first year postpartum. Using cluster analysis…

  • Program implications of intent to use: An analysis of women’s contraceptive intentions in ten low- and middle-income geographies

    Central to the ongoing debate surrounding rights-based family planning measures is the need for a woman-centered paradigm. Despite this debate, in the 30 years since the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development, widely used family planning measures have evolved relatively slowly. In this paper, we describe the utilization of an understudied family planning indicator—women’s…

  • Contraceptive adoption and changes in empowerment in Kenya, Nigeria, and Senegal

    Women’s empowerment and contraceptive use are critical to achieving gender equality. The positive association between more empowered women and higher rates of contraceptive use has been well-established by cross-sectional research. However, there remains a gap in understanding the longitudinal relationship between contraceptive adoption and changes to women’s empowerment. This study represents a novel approach to…

  • FPsim: an agent-based model of family planning

    The behavioral and biological underpinnings of family planning (FP) unfold on an individual level, across a full reproductive lifecourse, and within a complex system of social and structural constraints. Yet, much of the existing FP modeling landscape hasfocused solely on macro- or population-level dynamics of family planning. There is a need for an individual-based approach…

  • Estimating the levels and trends of family planning indicators in 436 sub-national areas across 26 countries in sub-Saharan Africa

    Background Scaling up access to safe, effective, and voluntary family planning (FP) services to achieve universal access for women and families will require increased commitment by countries and international organizations. On the way toward universal access, quantitative family planning goals have also been established by the United Nations through the sustainable development goals (SDGs). Here,…

  • Sub-national levels and trends in contraceptive prevalence, unmet need, and demand for family planning in Nigeria with survey uncertainty

    Background Ambitious global goals have been established to provide universal access to affordable modern contraceptive methods. To measure progress toward such goals in populous countries like Nigeria, it’s essential to characterize the current levels and trends of family planning (FP) indicators such as unmet need and modern contraceptive prevalence rates (mCPR). Moreover, the substantial heterogeneity…