Publisher/Institution: University of East Anglia

Abstract: Maternal mortality rates remain high because of low use of delivery care. While governments implement exemption schemes to reduce “barriers to access” to delivery care, little is known about women’s actual preferences. This study combines data from a survey and a choice experiment in Tanzania to compare women’s preferences with real choices of delivery care. We find that poor and lowly empowered women attach lower weights to the quality of delivery care, which indicates their lower use of delivery care is partly induced by their preferences. Barriers to access for poor women are particularly severe in case of delivery complications.