PDF, 1536K - Measure DHS

7.2 NEED FOR FAMILY PLANNING SERVICES
Women who are currently married and who say either they want no more children or want to
wait at least two years before having another child, but are not using contraception, are considered to
have an unmet need for family planning. 1 Women who are currently using family planning methods are
said to have a met need for family planning. The sum of women with unmet need and met need
constitutes the total demand for family planning.
Table 7.5 presents the demand for family planning services by background characteristics.
Thirty-six percent of currently married women have an unmet need for family planning, with 22 percent
having an unmet need for spacing and 14 percent having an unmet need for limiting. Only 8 percent
of women have a met need for family planning. If all currently married women who say that they want
to space or limit their children were to use family planning methods, the contraceptive prevalence rate
would increase from 8 percent to 44 percent (the sum of the met and unmet need or total demand).
Currently, only 18 percent of the family planning needs of currently married women are being met.
The level of unmet need for spacing decreases with age, while the opposite is true for unmet need
for limiting when older women have a greater unmet need than younger women do. The total unmet
need for family planning varies little by age group among women younger than 45 years but falls
markedly for women age 45-49.
Unmet need is higher among rural than urban among women (37 percent and 25 percent,
respectively). The difference is more pronounced for unmet need for spacing than for limiting. The
overall unmet need for family planning is the highest in the Amhara Region (41 percent) and the lowest
in the Affar Region (12 percent). While the unmet need for limiting decreases as the level of education
increases, the unmet need for spacing is the highest among women with primary education.
7.3 IDEAL FAMILY SIZE
Information on the ideal family size was collected in two ways. Respondents who had no living
children were asked how many children they would like to have if they could choose the number of
children to have. Respondents with children were asked how many children they would like to have if
they could go back to the time when they did not have any children and could choose exactly the number
of children to have. Even though these questions are based on hypothetical situations, they give an idea
of the total number of children women who have not started childbearing will have in the future, while
among older and high parity women, these data provide a measure of the level of unwanted fertility.
Table 7.6 shows that the majority of respondents were able to provide a numeric response to
these questions. Nevertheless, 18 percent of women and 11 percent of men gave non-numeric responses
such as “it is up to God,” “any number,” or “do not know.” Two in three women favored an ideal family
size of four or more children. Only 17 percent of women favor less than four children, with 4 percent
not wanting any children at all. The average ideal family size among all women who gave numeric
responses is 5.3 children, while it is 5.8 children among currently married women.
1 For an exact description of the calculation, see footnote 1, Table 7.5.
90 * Fertility Preference