Abstract:
Background: Despite the fact that Ethiopia has made significant improvement in achieving health outcomes, disparities in accessing maternal health services among educated and uneducated; rich and poor; and rural urban and rural women remain. This remains one of the main challenges in the Ethiopia’s development.
Objective: The main objective of this study is to assess differences, examine the factors that affect Key Maternal Health Services, and analyze trends which for this paper are Antenatal Care (ANC) and Skilled Birth Attendance (SBA) in Oromia Region; and to also assess whether the utilization of these key maternal health services differ from the national average.
Methods: The main source of data for this study is EDHS 2000, 2005, and 2011. Methods used include descriptive statistics, bivariate and multi-variate logistic regression analysis models.
Results: The study showed that the odds of attending ANC among educated women (secondary and above) were three, three and five times; for SBA five, eight and eight times as compared with uneducated women respectively (EDHS 2000, 2005 and 2011). Use of ANC (EDHS 2005-2011) increased faster for uneducated women (by 4.33 points) for the national average but was slower by (7.8 points) in Oromia Region comparing with their respective educated counterparts.
Conclusion and recommendation: Even though ANC and SBA have significantly increased over time, both in Oromia and nationally, the progress is disproportionate in Oromia among educated and uneducated women. This study also identified that average country level data and analysis masks the actual disparities at Oromia Regional level. Making rigorous analysis of the sub national data, focusing on girls’ education and evaluating the implementation of HEP at Oromia Regional level and how it has been reached out to the uneducated and rural women is crucial.
...................................... Thesis available at ACIPH Library