Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Modern family planning methods are readily available in Jordan, but are not persistently used. Reasons for this include inadequate counseling by midwives at the clinic level, and poor quality of information regarding the safety and efficacy of MFPM. In order to test the role that Behavorial Economics (BE) might play in increasing the persistence in the use of MFPM, our intervention included two main components. First, and in order to address the shortcomings in counseling, we designed a counseling guide for midwives that augmented existing counseling methods by including the most current information on modern family planning methods, as well as current information on the proper use of traditional family planning methods. In addition, and most importantly, the counseling guide included language reflecting two approaches from the Behavioral Economics (BE) literature: “framing” and “identity priming.” (Ashton et al., 2015). Our intervention included two intervention arms of four clinics each: one of which provided BE-influenced counseling, while the other provided this plus monthly text messages to postpartum women.

After controlling for multiple key predictors, women in the two intervention groups were significantly more likely than women in the control group to use MFPM at 3 months (OR = 1.6 and OR = 1.7, respectively), 6 months (OR = 1.9 and OR = 1.9, respectively), and 9 months (OR = 2.0 and OR = 2.3, respectively).

We also found that the intervention is cost-effective, suggesting promising potential for scaling up with sufficient policy and programming support.