Unmet need for family planning provides a measurement of the ability of women in achieving their desired family size and birth spacing. It also provides an indication of the success of reproductive health programmes in addressing demand for services. Unmet need complements the contraceptive prevalence rate by indicating the additional extent of need to delay or limit births. Unmet need is a rights-based measure that helps determine how well a country’s health system and social conditions support the ability of women to realize their stated preference to delay or limit births.
Definition:
The proportion of women of reproductive age (15-49 years) who are married or in union and who have an unmet need for family planning, i.e. who do not want any more children or want to wait at least two years before having a baby, and yet are not using contraception.
Disaggregation:
Age
Method of measurement
Unmet need for family planning = (Women who are married or in a consensual union who have an unmet need for family planning / Total number of women of reproductive age (15-49 years) who are married or in consensual union) x 100
Included in the numerator:
• All pregnant women (married or in consensual union) whose pregnancies were unwanted or mistimed at the time of conception.
• All postpartum amenorrheic women (married or in consensual union) who are not using family planning and whose last birth was unwanted or mistimed.
• All fecund women (married or in consensual union) who are neither pregnant nor postpartum amenorrheic, and who either do not want any more children (limit), or who wish to postpone the birth of a child for at least two years or do not know when or if they want another child (spacing), but are not using any contraceptive method.
Excluded from the numerator of the unmet need definition are pregnant and amenorrheic women who became pregnant unintentionally due to contraceptive method failure (these women are assumed to be in need of a better contraceptive method). Also excluded from the unmet need definition are infecund women. Women are assumed to be infecund if:
1) they have been married for five or more years AND
2) there have been no births in the past five years AND
3) they are not currently pregnant AND
4) they have never used any kind of contraceptive method OR
5) they self-report that they are infecund, menopausal or have had a hysterectomy.
Women who are married or in a consensual union are assumed as sexually active. If unmarried women are to be included in the calculation of UMN (in national monitoring), as a standard measure, they are assumed to be sexually active (and thus included in the numerator) if they have had intercourse in the month prior to the survey interview.
Data to measure this indicator are collected in household surveys, including Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), Reproductive Health Surveys (RHS), Fertility and Family Surveys (FFS), and other national survey efforts incorporating the DHS methodology (e.g. in India).
M&E Framework:
Outcome
Method of estimation:
The United Nations Population Division compiles and updates unmet need for family planning (UMN) data. Data are obtained from surveys including Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), Fertility and Family Surveys (FFS), Reproductive Health Surveys (RHS) and national surveys based on similar methodologies. When the information needed to calculate UMN is not available, the indicator is not estimated.
Predominant type of statistics: adjusted
Method of estimation of global and regional aggregates:
The group-level estimates are weighted averages of model-based country estimates for the reference year (2012) from Estimates and Projections of Family Planning Indicators 2014 (http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/theme/family-planning/cp_model.shtml) using as the weight the number of married or in-union women aged 15–49 in 2012.
The number of married or in-union women in each country is from: Estimates and Projections of the Number of Women Aged 15–49 Who Are Married or in a Union: 2013 Revision (http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/theme/marriage-unions/marriage_estimates.shtml).
Preferred data sources:
Household surveys
Unit of Measure:
N/A
Expected frequency of data dissemination:
Biennial (Two years)
Expected frequency of data collection:
Biennial (Two years)
Comments:
According to the standard definition, women who are using a traditional method of contraception are not considered as having an unmet need for family planning. As traditional methods are considerably less effective than modern methods, additional analyses often distinguish between traditional and modern methods and also report on unmet need for effective contraception.
In some countries DHS samples do not include non-married or non-consensual union women. These women are not considered to be sexually active, while married women are assumed to be sexually active and at risk of pregnancy. The assumption of universal exposure among married women increases the estimate. (Additional questions probing reasons for non-use of family planning often elicit reports of low risk due to infrequent sexual activity, including spousal separation resulting from labor migration.)
In some instances, it might be possible, in particular at low levels of contraceptive prevalence that, when contraceptive prevalence increases, unmet need for family planning also increase. Such a trend shows increased demand in a population where contraceptive supply cannot keep up with. Both indicators therefore need to be interpreted together.
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