| dc.description.abstract | Despite the numerous programmatic efforts made by the government in partnership with the private sector, levels of unmet need for family planning still remain high among women in Kenya's rural areas. This study utilizes data from the 2008-09 KDHS to examine factors that determine levels of unmet need for contraception among women in rural areas of Kenya. Leaving out currently pregnant - and amenorrheic women, this study uses data of all other rural women in their reproductive ages as the unit of analysis.
Frequency distributions, cross tabulations and logistic regression have been used as tools of analysis. Frequency distributions provided.a summary of rural women according to selected characteristics, cross tabulations provided the differentials of various components of unmet need for family planning by selected characteristic, while multivariate regression models provided predictor variables which were significantly associated with the various components of unmet need for contraception.Regression analyses reveal that several variables are significantly related to unmet need for spacing, unmet need for limiting childbearing and total unmet need.
Among the variables are women in rural areas' marital status, age, secondary or higher level of education, number of living children, employment status, region of residence, household wealth index and exposure to mass media communications. In order to reduce unmet need for family planning in rural areas of Kenya, region-specific programmatic action should be adopted, active female involvement in education should be a priority to the government, and women should be enabled to acquire economic empowerment, agencies involved in family planning provision and communication should offer suitable services that target specific age groups, and a lot of these services should be offered to married women.
Moreover, greater focus should be on provision of family planning services in order for women to space their child births.
Future researchers should endeavour to refine further, the measure of unmet need for family planning so as to include those women who are not currently included while they intend to limit or space births, and exclude those currently included yet they do not have intentions to use contraceptives. Moreover, future studies should examine the factors that determine unmet need among adolescent women in Kenya. Studies should also be done to understand the determinants of unmet need for family planning among counterpart women in Kenya's urban areas. | en_US |
