DOI: 10.36347/sjams.2016.v04i01.035

Pages: 189-195

Maternal health has emerged as global priority because of existing gap between Agrarian and pastoral communities. A women’s health is critical to her own life, and to the well-being of her family and the economy of her community and her country. But 99% of maternal deaths do occur in developing countries. Place of delivery is a crucial factor that affects the health and wellbeing of the mother and newborn. Even though 34% of pregnant women received at least one antenatal care from Ethiopia by 2013, institutional delivery was only 10%. The main objective of the study was to assess the prevalence of institutional delivery especially on pastoralist community of Afar region, North Eastern Ethiopia. Community based cross-sectional study was carried out from January to February 2014. Multi stage sampling technique was used to select 788 sample participants. A structured interviewer administered questionnaire was used to gather the required data. The collected data was coded, entered, and cleaned on Epi Info version 3.5.4 and it was finally exported to SPSS version 20 for further analysis. Frequency distributions, cross-tabulations and a graph were used to describe the results of the study. In results Ante Natal Coverage (ANC) of the district was 42.4% and there was only 7.4% institutional delivery service utilization. Educated mothers had significant association with Health facility preference. Being educational status of college/university graduate was about 5 times more likely to give birth at health institutions than their counterparts. (AOR= 5.052, 95% CI: 1.184, 21554).