*3.1. Descriptive Analysis*

Table 1 presents descriptive statistics of the participants. The overall prevalence of any contraceptive use among married women of reproductive age in Rwanda was 52.7%, of whom 46.8% use modern methods and 5.9% use traditional methods. The average current age of women was 32.8 years, with a minimum age of 16 and a maximum age of 49 years. The average age of first cohabitation was 21 years, the minimum age was 10 and maximum age was 95. Most of the respondents were from rural areas (83%) and 17.0% were from urban areas. It is also observed in the same table that 55.0% of respondents had heard about family planning on the radio, 7.1% on TV and 6.1% in newspapers or magazines. Table 1 shows that 29.2% of the respondents were visited by a family planning planner in the 12 months prior to the survey, 71.8% of the respondents visited health facilities in the 12 months prior to the survey and 46.3% were told about family planning at a health facility. The majority of the respondents (86.8%) were working during the period of the survey. It can also be observed that most of the respondents had primary education (70.5%) and most of the women had two living children (45.2%). It is also observed that 38.2% of the respondents were Catholic, 45.2% were Protestant, 3.2% were from religions other than Catholic, Protestant or Seventh Day Adventist and 12.8% were Seventh Day Adventist.




**Table 1.** *Cont.*

It is observed from Table 2 that modern contraceptive methods were the most (46.9%) used among married women of childbearing age in Rwanda and traditional method use was 5.9%.



The association between current contraceptive use among married women or women living with their partners, and various potential factors, was tested by the Chi-square statistical test at 5% level of significance and the results are summarized in Table 3. Education level of the respondents was significantly associated with current use of contraceptive methods (*p*-value < 0.0001). It can be seen from the table that the prevalence of contraceptive use was 56.8%, 53.5%, 53.7% and 47.3% among women with tertiary education, secondary and primary education level respectively. The working status of the woman was significantly associated with current use of contraceptive methods among women of reproductive age (*p*-value < 0.0001). It can be observed from the table that the prevalence of contraceptive use was 53.6% among women who were working at the time of the survey. Hearing about family planning on the radio, from newspapers or magazines and on the TV was each significantly associated with contraceptive use (*p*-value < 0.0001) and the prevalence of contraceptive use in this regard was 55.8%, 63.9% or 60.1% among the women respectively. Religion was significantly associated with contraceptive use among women. The prevalence of contraceptive use was 56.9% among Catholic women, 47.5% among Protestant women, 58.9% among Seventh Day Adventist women and 53.4% among women from religions other than Catholic, Protestant and Seventh Day Adventist. The issue of education and its influence on contraceptive use is also a salient finding of the current research. The education of the husband was significantly associated with current contraceptive use among women (*p*-value = 0.018). The prevalence of contraceptive use was 48.1%, 53.7%, 53.0% and 54.2% among women married to husbands with no education, primary education, secondary education and tertiary education respectively.


**Table 3.** The prevalence of contraceptive use among women of childbearing age by category.

We now consider the model fit comparisons. The findings from Table 4 reveal that model 4 has smaller DIC compared to the DIC of model 1, model 2 and model 3. Therefore based on the principles of the DIC (that state that the smaller the DIC the better the model fit [23]), model 4 was found to be the better model fit, and it is therefore used in the final analysis in this study.


