Exploring Geographical Variations in Unmet Need for Contraception in Ghana by Means of Small Area Estimates

Fiifi Amoako Johnson, University of Southampton
Sabu S. Padmadas, University of Southampton
James J. Brown, University of London

The importance of meeting unmet need for contraception has been reaffirmed recently with the introduction of a new indicator on unmet need as part of MDG5. Nowhere is this more urgent than the sub-Saharan African countries where stalled fertility declines are seen and unmet need affects more than 20% of women. In Ghana, fertility has fallen in some parts of the country but not in others. Local contexts are therefore important and information at subnational level is useful for building effective family planning policies. This paper uses small area estimations of contraceptive use to understand the locally defined nature of the fertility decline in Ghana and to inform strategies to reduce unwanted births in a country with a high maternal mortality rate. To arrive at the estimates we used a special case of the Generalized Linear Mixed Model with logit link function applied in the context of small area estimation.