Measurement of Access to Family Planning Services in Demographic and Health Surveys: What Do We Measure? What Do We Want to Measure? How Do We Get There?

Madeleine Short Fabic, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)
Jacob A. Adetunji, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)

Access to family planning (FP) services is a core step to increase contraceptive prevalence rates and reduce unmet need for FP and unintended pregnancies. Its complex concept and multiple elements, however, challenge measurement of access as an indicator or a set of indicators, which would require both population- and facility-level data. Given challenges in measuring access, the purpose of this study is to improve our understanding on data related to access in Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and Service Provision Assessment (SPA). Specific objectives are to: review current indicators related to access to FP services in DHS, with close attention to selection in denominators of each indicator, and SPA; assess use of DHS or SPA data in peer-reviewed research regarding access; and identify analysis and data gaps for the measurement. Discussion will focus on ways to improve the measurement using DHS and SPA as well as other data sources.