Abstract
Historically, family planning (FP) programs in low-income countries (LICs) have been valued for their benefits to child and maternal health. Today, there is a focus on integrating contraceptive access into women’s rights. 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. Results suggest that longer durations of contraceptive use correlates with increased time spent in work and paid employment, with significant differences between non-users and long-term users. The paper also finds that consistent contraceptive use—whether through long-acting modern methods or short-term modern or traditional methods—is linked to up to 4 additional years of gainful economic activity over women’s reproductive years. This suggests that, in addition to the well-documented direct health benefits of contraception, there are also significant economic advantages for consistent users. Future work should extend this approach to other countries and explore how these findings translate into economic benefits at the country level.
Funder
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation