Quantifying the Community Effect on Contraceptive Use in Egypt

Abstract

Egypt has significant regional heterogeneity in contraceptive use rates. Few previous studies showed that the regional variation remains even after controlling for individual and household characteristics. This study aims at investigating the multilevel dependence of contraceptive use on socioeconomic change in Egypt between 2000 and 2014. The questions of this research are: 1) Do the regional variations in contraceptive use change with time? 2) To what extent can the regional variations be explained in terms of individual, household and contextual variables? Egypt Demographic and Health surveys "EDHS"; 2000 and are the main sources of data. EDHS is a nationally representative survey, it provides data of (15-49) ever-married women. For specifying the individual and contextual determinants of Contraceptive use, the multilevel modelling approach is used. The dependent variable is "the current use of any modern method"; this variable is a dichotomous variable; it equals 1, if the woman is currently using any modern method and it equals 0, if she isn't using. The results show that about 7.5% of the variability in the current use of any modern method is due to the differences between level 1 units (governorates of Egypt) in 2000. This percentage decreased to reach 6.6% in 2014. This indicates that still the contraceptive use rates depends on the socioeconomic development and the contextual norms heterogeneity among different regions of Egypt. The level of education of woman and her husband, her discussion of family planning and her husband's approval on family planning, on the womenlevel, the mean number of children ever born and wealth index, on the regionslevel are the most important variables affecting the odds of using a modern contraceptive method.

Urban and Rural Differences Regarding Family Planning Outcomes in Assiut District, Assiut Governorate, Egypt

“…16 This difference could be attributed to that Upper Egypt is the most disadvantaged region in Egypt with the least prevalence of modern methods use. 17 The modern contraceptive prevalence is significantly lower in the rural Assiut district than in the urban areas. In Egypt, women in rural areas have poorer knowledge of family planning methods and family planning services than urban women.…”