Ambitious global goals have been established to provide universal access to affordable modern contraceptive methods. The UN’s sustainable development goal 3.7.1 proposes satisfying the demand for family planning (FP) services by increasing the proportion of women of reproductive age using modern methods. To measure progress toward such goals in populous countries like Nigeria, it’s essential to characterize the current levels and trends of FP indicators such as unmet need and modern contraceptive prevalence rates (mCPR). Moreover, the substantial heterogeneity across Nigeria and scale of programmatic implementation requires a sub-national resolution of these FP indicators. However, significant challenges face estimating FP indicators sub-nationally in Nigeria. In this article, we develop a robust, data-driven model to utilize all available surveys to estimate the levels and trends of FP indicators in Nigerian states for all women and by age-parity demographic subgroups. We estimate that overall rates and trends of mCPR and unmet need have remained low in Nigeria: the average annual rate of change for mCPR by state is 0.5% (0.4%,0.6%) from 2012-2017. Unmet need by age-parity demographic groups varied significantly across Nigeria; parous women express much higher rates of unmet need than nulliparous women. Our hierarchical Bayesian model incorporates data from a diverse set of survey instruments, accounts for survey uncertainty, leverages spatio-temporal smoothing, and produces probabilistic estimates with uncertainty intervals. Our flexible modeling framework directly informs programmatic decision-making by identifying age-parity-state subgroups with large rates of unmet need, highlights conflicting trends across survey instruments, and holistically interprets direct survey estimates.
