Content area
Full text
Introduction
In recent decades, women's empowerment has emerged as a major theme on the international development agenda (Malhotra et al., 2002). Further, the commitment to improve gender equality and women's empowerment was reiterated in the Third Millennium Development Goal (MDG3) and in the World Bank's World Development Report of 2012 as critical factors to improving health and reaching development goals (UN General Assembly, 2000; Kabeer, 2005a).
Women's empowerment - defined as 'the expansion of people's ability to make strategic life choices in a context where this ability was previously denied to them' (Kabeer, 1999, 2001b) - is increasingly considered a key factor affecting family planning and reproductive health outcomes among women. Central to understanding and supporting women's ability to make strategic life choices is examining the role of gender-based power as it affects sexual and reproductive health outcomes (Blanc, 2001).
The ability to decide freely the number, spacing and timing of one's children is a basic human right, endorsed at the International Conference on Population and Development in 1994 (United Nations Population Fund, 1994). Family planning programmes are associated with lower fertility and lower maternal mortality (Cleland et al., 2006). Through family planning programmes, women gain access to contraceptives, increasing the likelihood that they can achieve their desired family size. Yet, despite the well-documented benefits of family planning, an estimated 40% of pregnancies are unintended (Sedgh et al., 2014) and unmet need for contraception remains high despite increased availability of methods (Cleland et al., 2014). Persistent barriers to contraceptive use and related behaviours underscore the need to expand the understanding of, and improve efforts to address, structural drivers of contraceptive use, such as women's empowerment.
Previous research on women's empowerment points to its pivotal role in influencing reproductive health behaviours, though there is wide variation in results (Abadian, 1996; Blanc, 2001; Malhotra et al., 2002; Kishor & Subaiya, 2008). A more recent review of women's empowerment and fertility shows that women's empowerment is associated with lower fertility, longer birth intervals and lower rates of unintended pregnancy (Upadhyay et al., 2014).
Drawing on a theoretical framework outlined by Blanc, the conceptualization formulated by Kabeer and prevailing assumptions about gender dynamics and reproductive health (Kabeer, 1999, 2001b; Blanc, 2001), it is...