IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/csa/wpaper/2021-04.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Media or the Message? Experimental Evidence on Mass Media and Modern Contraception Uptake in Burkina Faso

Author

Listed:
  • Rachel Glennerster
  • Joanna Murray
  • Victor Pouliquen

Abstract

Mass media can spread information and disinformation, but its impact is hard to rigorously measure. Using a two-level randomized controlled trial covering 5 million people, we test both exposure to mass media (with 1,500 women receiving radios) and the impact of a high-quality, intensive 2.5 year, family planning mass media campaign in Burkina Faso (8 of 16 local radio stations received the campaign). We find women who received a radio in noncampaign areas reduced contraception use by 5.2 percentage points (p=0.039) and had more conservative gender attitudes. In contrast, modern contraceptive use rose 5.9 percentage points (p=0.046) in campaign areas and 5.8 percentage points (p=0.030) among those given radios in campaign areas. Births fell 10%. The campaign changed beliefs about contraception but not preferences, and encouraged existing users to use more consistently. We estimate the nationwide campaign scale-up led to 225,000 additional women using modern contraception, at a cost of US$7.7 per additional user.

Suggested Citation

  • Rachel Glennerster & Joanna Murray & Victor Pouliquen, 2021. "The Media or the Message? Experimental Evidence on Mass Media and Modern Contraception Uptake in Burkina Faso," CSAE Working Paper Series 2021-04, Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford.
    • Handle: RePEc:csa:wpaper:2021-04
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:a41bd05f-ed71-4001-8333-0f97b14d68a8
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Pascaline Dupas & Seema Jayachandran & Adriana Lleras-Muney & Pauline Rossi, 2024. "The Negligible Effect of Free Contraception on Fertility: Experimental Evidence from Burkina Faso," NBER Working Papers 32427, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Rachel Cassidy & Anaya Dam & Wendy Janssens & Umair Kiani & Karlijn Morsink, 2022. "Father of the bride, or steel magnolias? Targeting men, women or both to reduce child marriage," IFS Working Papers W22/50, Institute for Fiscal Studies.
    3. Rachel Cassidy & Anaya Dam & Wendy Janssens & Umair Kiani & Karlijn Morsink, 2024. "Targeting men, women or both to reduce child marriage," Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers 22-087/V, Tinbergen Institute, revised 22 Oct 2024.
    4. Céline Zipfel, 2022. "The demand side of Africa's demographic transition: desired fertility, wealth, and jobs," STICERD - Economic Organisation and Public Policy Discussion Papers Series 71, Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines, LSE.
    5. Ada Gonzalez-Torres, 2022. "Local Media and the Shaping of Social Norms: Evidence from the Ebola outbreak," Papers 2210.15946, arXiv.org, revised Dec 2023.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Mass Media Campaign; Radio; Modern Contraception; Family Planning; RCT.;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • J13 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Fertility; Family Planning; Child Care; Children; Youth
    • J16 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
    • L82 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Services - - - Entertainment; Media

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:csa:wpaper:2021-04. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Julia Coffey (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/csaoxuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.