Trends and risk factors of age at first birth in Uganda

Young age at childbearing has been identified as one of the factors perpetuating high fertility in Uganda, which has been attributed to the young age at childbearing. This paper estimated trends and identified the risk factors for young age at childbearing in Uganda. The paper used cross-sectional retrospective data collected by the Uganda Demographic and Health Surveys of 2001, 2006 and 2011 on women aged 15-49 years. Survival analysis using the Kaplan-Meier survival function was used at the bivariate level to estimate differentials in the median age at first birth and the Cox’s proportional hazard model to identify significant risk factors of the young age at first birth. As hypothesized, level of education was found to be a significant risk factor of young age at first birth, regardless of age cohorts of women. Other risk factors were being less than 18 years of age at first sex, Muslim, rural residence, living in northern Uganda, lower wealth index and lack of family planning services. Increasing the participation of women in post primary education should be implemented as a broader framework for changing the fertility behaviour of Ugandan women.