Women’s empowerment indicators and short- and long-acting contraceptive method use: evidence from DHS from 11 countries

Plain Language summary By 2060, sub-Saharan Africa is expected to have more population than Southern, Eastern, and Central Asia. Modern contraception is identified to be effective in reducing population growth. There is limited evidence on the association between women empowerment indicators and the type of contraception used by women in sub-Saharan Africa, either short or long-acting methods. Hence, this study investigated the relationship between women empowerment indicators and the type of contraception used by women in 11 sub-Saharan African countries. We performed both descriptive and inferential analyses. The descriptive analysis, being frequencies and percentages, focused on women empowerment indicators and the proportion of women who use contraception. The inferential analysis was multinomial logistic regression. The findings showed that 15.95% of women do not use modern contraception, however, 30.67% and 53.38% were using long-acting and short-acting contraception, respectively. Women who worked had higher odds of using long-acting and short-acting methods than those who did not work. Women with high decision-making capacity had high likelihood of using long-acting methods than women with low decision-making capacity. Women with medium knowledge level had a higher likelihood of using long-acting methods than their counterparts with low knowledge level. The study highlights the need for governments in the studied countries to review current interventions and adopt new ones to make the interventions more responsive to the contraception needs of women, irrespective of their empowerment status.