Postpartum Contraception in Rural Mozambique: Linking the Users’ and Providers’ Perspectives

Victor Agadjanian, Arizona State University
Sarah R. Hayford, Arizona State University

The paper examines family planning itineraries of rural women in southern Mozambique, with a special focus on contraceptive uptake in the postpartum period. It is based on the first wave of an ongoing retrospective-prospective study of 285 HIV+ and HIV- women systematically selected from the lists of those who gave live births in four rural maternity clinics in 2011-12 and surveyed about 22 months after their deliveries. We use event-history analysis to model women’s contraceptive initiation from their sociodemographic characteristics and characteristics of their households. To complement individual and household perspectives on family planning with an institutional one, we used data on women’s physical access to maternal and child health services and their exposure to family planning counselling during the antenatal and perinatal period.