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.
