ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Glob. Women’s Health
Sec. Maternal Health
Volume 6 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fgwh.2025.1589721
Estimating the impact of prenatal health care services on adverse pregnancy outcomes in Tanzania: a propensity score matching (PSM) approach
Provisionally accepted
- 1University of Dar es Salaam, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
- 2Graduate School of Public Policy, Nazarbayev University, Nur-Sultan, Akmola, Kazakhstan
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The prevalence of adverse pregnancy outcomes remains one of the public issues that needs to be addressed in low-and middle-income countries (LMICs), including Tanzania. Despite evidence on the effectiveness of antenatal care (ANC) services in addressing adverse pregnancy outcomes, empirical studies are scarce. Therefore, this study aims to analyze the impact of ANC services on adverse pregnancy outcomes.Methods: This is a retrospective study that uses secondary data from the Tanzania Demographic and Health Survey for 2022. The impact of ANC services on adverse pregnancy outcomes was estimated using Propensity Score Matching (PSM), and the robustness of results was checked using doubly robust estimators Results: Adequate ANC services utilization reduces adverse pregnancy outcomes in Tanzania. Specifically, adequate ANC services utilization reduces adverse pregnancy outcomes: 5.6% -8.2% (depending on the PSM approach used). Similarly, an adequate ANC package reduces adverse pregnancy outcomes: 6.3% to 9.3% (depending on the PSM approach used).The prevalence of adverse pregnancy outcomes needs to be addressed through adherence to ANC services utilization. Despite the utilization of ANC services being influenced by social, economic, and demographic factors, it is important to ensure essential packages of services are delivered to a pregnant woman for better pregnancy outcomes, as our results show that ANC visits alone have no significant impact.
Keywords: Antenatal care, Stillbirths, miscarriage, adverse pregnancy, Tanzania, Demographic and Health Survey, Propensity score matching
Received: 10 Mar 2025; Accepted: 09 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Ntegwa and Pelizzo. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Magashi Joseph Ntegwa, University of Dar es Salaam, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
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