80% women believe contraceptives cause family conflict - study
A research conducted by Makerere University School of Public Health has indicated that 80 percent of married women believe the use of birth control methods leads to family conflict like violence against women.
A research conducted by Makerere University School of Public Health has indicated that 80 percent of married women believe the use of birth control methods leads to family conflict like violence against women.
The annual Performance Monitoring for Action (PMA) study project that has been since 2014 collecting information about family planning services and uptake in Uganda follows a bigger meeting, FP2020 which Ugandan officials attended in London, where several countries committed themselves to increase contraceptives for both men and women especially those who wish to use them.
Prof Frederick Makumbi, the research principle investigator, said although the resources were injected, the only way to audit the effectiveness is through collecting data on the number of uptakes every year, unlike the Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS) which does every five years.
"And yes, there has been a significant improvement. By the time we began, the percentage of married women who had taken modern contraceptive in 2014 was about 26 but as of 2018 after the annual survey, we found that it had moved from 26.7 to 36.3percent," Prof Makumbi said.
Prof Makumbi said such findings would never be known if data collection on an annual basis was not done. He further said the research used married women as samples because they are more at risk and therefore, one of the indicators of family planning.
The study also assessed how many of the women who use family planning discontinue because that can be a reflection of poor service delivery, people's desires to stop using family planning because they want some children, they could be lack of those commodities or because of side effects.
"We got about 15 percent of the women whom we interviewed in 2016; the ones we got were actually formerly non users but by 2019, they had adopted or actually started using [family planning]. So if you are going to budget for commodities, you know how many you are going to budget for so you don’t have to buy excess or less. So these numbers are important for planning and resource allocation," Prof Makumbi states further.
For every 100 women interviewed around June 2019, 15 percent were new users (had not been using the previous year) probably to minimise the size of their families while 12 percent have discontinued some of which reasons are partner support which may not be there.
