A new look at contraceptive prevalence plateaus in sub-Saharan Africa: A probabilistic approach

Abstract

BACKGROUND Fertility decline in sub-Saharan Africa has been slower than in other regions, with the periods of extremely slow transitions frequently described as stalled. Lack of investment in family planning programs has been proposed as a key contributing factor. However, while there is a large literature on fertility transition stalls, similar phenomena in contraceptive prevalence trends have received less attention. OBJECTIVE We propose a probabilistic method for detecting plateaus in modern contraceptive prevalence (MCP) and in demand for family planning satisfied by modern methods (DS).