Demographic and Socioeconomic Determinants of Contraceptive Use among Urban Women in the Melanesian Countries in the South Pacific: A Case Study of Port Vila Town in Vanuatu

Abstract

Results of this first-ever survey on the current use of contraceptives among the married women of reproductive age group living in Port Vila, the capital of Vanuatu, are encouraging. The results show that socioeconomic policies aimed at empowerment of women through improved opportunities for education and employment to improve their status would contribute to higher motivation for limiting family size. Further, improved health care and child health programs would contribute to reduction in infant mortality and ensure child survival so that the desire to have more children on the grounds of uncertainty of survival of living children will be decreased. The major conclusion is that a woman-centered strategy for population management is urgently called for. The strategy should pay attention to health care programs and generation of greater educational and employment opportunities in accordance with the recommendations of the United Nations International Conference on Population and Development (UN ICPD) held in Cairo in September 1994 (United Nations 1994). Further, the influence of mass media should be recognized and harnessed, supplemented bv improved counseling advice and greater number of visits by family health workers to married women in the reproductive age group.