BEST Country Fact Sheets
National surveys contain a wealth of family planning, reproductive health, and maternal and child health indicators. Comparing these indicators across subnational groups, such as urban versus rural populations or by relative poverty, can pinpoint inequalities and gaps in coverage and assist policymakers and program planners in developing more effective and efficient interventions.
In most developing countries, poverty is highly correlated with place of residence; that is, urban households tend to concentrate among the highest-wealth groups, while rural households tend to concentrate among the poor. Thus, any national comparison of the least poor with the most poor tends to compare the bulk of the urban population with the poorest of the rural poor, making it impossible to determine to what degree the findings reflect inequalities by wealth and/or inequalities by geography. The development of separate urban and rural wealth indices provides a way out of this dilemma.
These fact sheets summarize a few findings from secondary analyses of select Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS). Separate wealth classifications for urban and rural women were constructed to examine inequalities in key population and reproductive health indicators, including family planning and antenatal care. The analyses demonstrate that disaggregating relative wealth by place of residence may reveal patterns obscured by national trends and the importance of examining multiple indicators.
