The purpose of this indicator is to help in providing coverage of family planning programs and services, prevention of pregnancy and couples decision rights on the number and spacing of their children and contribution to maternal and child health by keeping track of the proportion of women who have access to family planning with modern methods.

The percentage of women of reproductive age (15-49 years) who desire either to have no (additional) children or to postpone the next child and who are currently using a modern contraceptive method. The proportion of demand for family planning satisfied with modern methods is useful in assessing overall levels of coverage for family planning programs and services. Access to and use of an effective means to prevent pregnancy helps enable women and their partners to exercise their rights to decide freely and responsibly the number and spacing of their children and to have the information, education and means to do so.

Ministry of Health (MOH)

Ministry of Health (MOH)

Annual

Percentage (%)

Meeting demand for family planning with modern methods also contributes to maternal and child health by preventing unintended pregnancies and closely spaced pregnancies, which are at higher risk for poor obstetrical outcomes. Levels of demand for family planning satisfied with modern methods of 75 per cent or more are generally considered high, and values of 50 per cent or less are generally considered as very low.

The percentage of women of reproductive age (15-49 years) who have their need for family planning satisfied with modern methods is also referred to as the proportion of demand satisfied by modern methods. The components of the indicator are contraceptive prevalence (any method and modern methods) and unmet need for family planning.

Contraceptive prevalence is the percentage of women who are currently using, or whose sexual partner is currently using, at least one method of contraception, regardless of the method used.

Unmet need for family planning is defined as the percentage of women of reproductive age, either married or in a union, who want to stop or delay childbearing but are not using any method of contraception. The standard definition of unmet need for family planning includes women who are fecund and sexually active in the numerator, and who report not wanting any (more) children, or who report wanting to delay the birth of their next child for at least two years or are undecided about the timing of the next birth, but who are not using any method of contraception. The numerator also includes pregnant women whose pregnancies were unwanted or mistimed at the time of conception; and postpartum amenorrhoeic women who are not using family planning and whose last birth was unwanted or mistimed.

This indicator is disaggregated is by age, geographic location, marital status, socioeconomic status and other categories, depending on the data source and number of observations.

This indicator is calculated using the following formula:

Demand satisfied by by modern methods = (Number of women who are currently using a modern method of contraception)/ (Number of women who are using any method of contraception or are having an unmet need for family planning modern methods)

This indicator helps the Ministry of Health to create comprehensive initiatives to increase family planning uptake.

• Lack of probing questions in surveys, asked to ensure that the respondent understands the meaning of the different contraceptive methods, can result in an underestimation of contraceptive prevalence, in particular for traditional methods.
• Sampling variability can also be an issue, especially when contraceptive prevalence is measured for a specific subgroup (according to method, age-group, level of educational attainment, place of residence, etc.) or when analysing trends over time.

All the metadata shown in this document was gathered from United Nation Statistics Division. The metadata was extracted from https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/metadata/.