Contraceptive trajectories and women's years of employment activity in low-income countries: combining fictive cohorts, contraceptive calendar data and sequence analysis

Moussa Zan, ISSP
Clementine Rossier, University of Geneva
Matthias Studer, Université de Genève and NCCR-LIVES
Dao Oumarou, Assistant de recherche
Georges Guiella, Institut Supérieur des Sciences de La Population de L’Université Joseph Ki-Zerbo

Historically, family planning (FP) programs in low-income countries (LICs) have been valued for their benefits to child and maternal health. However, measuring the impact of FP on women’s economic empowerment remains challenging due to a lack of comprehensive longitudinal data. This paper aims to model the relationship between contraceptive use and women's economic empowerment using cross-sectional data, while acknowledging the limitations posed by age structure, cumulative benefits, and dynamic contraceptive behaviors. It proposes a fictive cohort approach to measure empowerment over the life course, utilizing retrospective calendar data (past 36 months) to analyze different recent contraceptive use patterns and applying sequence analysis to summarize it. Using data collected in one survey in 2020-21 in Burkina Faso, our analysis examines recent contraceptive behavior among women in union aged 20 to 44 and its association with current empowerment levels, projecting these relationships across the entire reproductive life course.

Keywords: Family Planning and Contraception, Fertility, Comparative methods

See paper.