How the background characteristics influences demand and unmet need of child spacing among women of Maldives

Abstract

Child spacing is a human right for all those who are in need. Therefore, child spacing methods should be supplied according to the demand of the certain community. Unmet need for child spacing is produced when the demands for child spacing services are not met in the community. The background characteristics that influences the demand and unmet need for child spacing includes, age; residence; region; education and wealth quintile of a women. This characteristic creates variation in the demand and unmet need for child spacing by increasing or decreasing the demand and unmet need for child spacing among women. In order to support this fact, secondary dataset from Maldives Demographic Health Survey 2009 is been used to acknowledge how the background characteristics influences demand and unmet need for child spacing. Both inferential and descriptive statistics are used to analyze the result and local and foreign literature was reviewed to support the reasons behind the trends of the analyzed data. It was known that, as age of women increases both demand and unmet need for child spacing decreases while the increase in education level of the women increases the demand and unmet need for child spacing in Maldives. As wealth quintile and residence show not much difference in the indicators, the south region of Maldives tends to have higher unmet need comparing to the rest of the Maldives, requiring for more studies to be done.