Estimation and Short-Term Projections of Contraceptive Prevalence

Clare Menozzi, United Nations
Ann E. Biddlecom, United Nations Population Division
Vladimira Kantorova, United Nations Population Division

Trends in contraceptive prevalence across the world are important to measure because they indicate, in part, the degree to which women and their partners are able to prevent unwanted pregnancy. An important challenge to examining trends over time is the sparse data on contraceptive use for most countries. About one-third of 193 countries have no more than two national-level data points from 1970 to 2010. This paper develops a Bayesian hierarchical model of contraceptive prevalence, taking into account factors that may bias estimates, to generate trends in contraceptive prevalence from 1970 to 2015 for all countries. The model contributes to our understanding of changes over time in contraceptive use by using observed patterns across countries to inform change within countries, enabling more rigorous comparisons across countries and geographic groups at the same point in time and by estimating the degree of uncertainty around trends in contraceptive use.