Basefinale2.dta

Title : Contraceptive trajectories and women's years of employment activity in low-income countries: combining fictive cohorts, contraceptive calendar data and sequence analysisThis paper aims to model the relationship between contraceptive use and women's economic empowerment using cross-sectional data, while acknowledging the limitations of age structure, cumulative benefits, and dynamic contraceptive behaviors. It proposes a fictive cohort approach to measure empowerment over time, utilizing retrospective calendar data to analyze different contraceptive use patterns and applying sequence analysis to data from the past 36 months. Using data collected in 2020 and 2021 in Burkina Faso, our analysis examines contraceptive behavior among women aged 20 to 44 and its association with current empowerment levels, projecting these relationships across reproductive life stages. Results suggest that longer contraceptive use correlates with increased time spent in work and paid employment, with significant differences between non-users and long-term users. The paper also finds that consistent contraceptive use—whether through long-acting modern methods or short-term modern or traditional methods—is linked to up to 4 additional years of gainful economic activity over women's reproductive years. This suggests that, in addition to the well-documented direct health benefits of contraception, there are also significant economic advantages for consistent users. Future work should extend this approach to other countries and explore how these findings translate into economic benefits.