Family planning availability and contraceptive use in rural Bangladesh: An examination of the distance decay effect

Using empirical data collected from a rural area of Bangladesh, this paper examines the effect of family planning availability on contraceptive use. The hypothesis is that the likelihood of contraceptive adoption is a function of accessibility to two different types of family planning service outlets (i.e. distance from these outlets has an impact on the use of contraception by married women of reproductive age, 15–49 yr). But the field data do not show a distance decay effect between availability and use of both clinical and non-clinical contraceptive methods. The observed effect is explained in terms of the presence of paved roads in the study area. The policy implications of this finding are discussed.