This study examined contraceptive use in the capital cities of four African countries,
Burkina Faso, Ghana, Morocco and Senegal. The article sought to answer two questions:
(i) what is the hierarchical ordering of causal relationships among the individual
factors involved in the use of contraception in the four urban populations
considered? More particularly, (ii) as education is a major factor of fertility transition,
are two main indirect pathways that have been proposed in the literature (a
union-reproductive path and a socio-cultural one), leading from women’s education
to contraceptive use, confirmed by the data? Having recourse to a secondary
analysis of Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data, the methodology is based
on recursive structural models represented by directed acyclic graphs. The empirical
analysis confirms the importance of variables such as the desire for children and
partner agreement on family planning in explaining contraceptive use. It also highlights
a structural union-reproductive path linking female education and contraceptive
use. On the contrary, the analysis leads to a tentative rejection of the socio-cultural
path, as it is falsified by the data available. The validity of these results is discussed.