Introduction:

Meeting the needs of reproductive health among women faced persistent challenges especially among poor and rural women who had some barriers to access health services. The objective was to explore the factors associated with contraceptive use among poor women who lived in rural areas in Indonesia.

Methods:

A sample of 10,199 poor women who lived in rural areas was extracted from the 49,627 nationally representative samples of the 2017 Indonesia Demographic and Health Survey. Logistic regression adjusted for the complex sample was considered to identify the predictors of contraceptive use among poor women who lived in rural areas in Indonesia.

Results:

The prevalence of modern contraceptive use among respondents was 63.1% consisted of 4.4% traditional contraceptive users and 58.7% modern contraceptive users. After adjusted for complex sample, the final model showed that factors related to their husbands such as husband’s occupation (AOR=1.94, 95% CI: 1.28-2.95) and both desire no more children (AOR=1.76, 95% CI: 1.48-2.10) were significantly positively associated with the use of contraceptive methods among poor women who lived in rural areas. Young women (aged 15-34), high parity (three and above), visited health facility and lived in Java-Bali were more likely to use contraceptive methods. However, higher educated women were less likely to use contraception even though they had more knowledge of contraceptive methods than low educated women.

Conclusion:

Despite many barriers to accessing reproductive health services, it is important to focus on strategies to increase contraceptive use among poor rural women. The study recommends that individual counseling from health providers should be strengthened to give women accurate information, including the side effect, of contraceptive methods that meet their individual needs.

Keywords: Contraception, Indonesia, Poor, Rural.