Interactions of education and the obstacles to contraceptive use in Sub-Saharan Africa

This paper tries to assess the causal mechanisms which lead to changing patterns of contraceptive use in a sample of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, alongside improvements in socio-economic conditions and in particular, progress in educational attainment. Factors associated with socioeconomic status and the respective probability of contraceptive prevalence and desired family size are well established. Nonetheless, in spite of education raising awareness and increasing the chances of using contraception, a considerable share of educated women are classified as having an unmet need in the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS). Given the recently revised and homogenized methods for analyzing the unmet need for family planning in the DHS, it is now possible to compare changes in contraceptive prevalence and obstacles to family planning over time. The paper presented here will investigate data from 19 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa with at least three rounds of DHS available. By applying age-period-cohort methods, we aim to establish interactions of contraceptive prevalence and obstacles to contraception with improvements in educational attainment, changing norms and values in ideal family size, opposition to family planning, family planning efforts and economic well-being over time.