Recent Fertility Trends in Sub-Saharan Africa Workshop Summary (2016) / Chapter Skim
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3 Trends in Reproductive Behavior
3 Trends in Reproductive Behavior
Pages 21-34
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From page 21... ...
Maggwa Baker Ndugga of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gave these issues a closer look through a focus on trends and policies in Kenya and Ghana. Cheikh Mbacké of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation offered comments on the presentations.
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From page 22... ...
Casterline explained that ideas about the ideal number of children have tended to change with total actual fertility rate, and he highlighted differences in both across four regions; see Figure 3-1. These data demonstrate that while fertility desires have declined in all regions, they are markedly higher in sub-Saharan African countries than in other regions, he explained, and people in the Central and West African regions desire the highest numbers of children.
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From page 23... ...
He concluded that a substantial fertility decline in the region will therefore require changes in both fertility desires and the implementation of those desires. Casterline closed by pointing out that there is a need for much deeper understanding of fertility demand in African countries.
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From page 24... ...
Spacing is a plan to have a child at a suitable time, for example to coincide with favorable expected life changes. In broad terms, Timaeus explained, the fertility transition that occurs in response to economic development is a response to several factors that affect fertility desires: • declines in child mortality, which allow couples to plan on having fewer children, typically half as many as before the decline; • more productive occupations opening up for women, increasing the opportunity cost of childbearing, and also increasing the ben efits of educating children; • possibility of insurance and other supports for old age reducing the pressure to have children who will bear this responsibility; • improvements in birth control technology and access to it; and • people increasingly viewing childbearing as a choice, rather than "something that happens to you." Women's thinking about childbearing is also affected by institutional factors, modeled in Figure 3-2, and it may be these issues that often cause them to postpone childbearing, Timaeus suggested.
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From page 25... ...
The impact of birth spacing on fertility is inherently limited, he observed, but birth postponement can result in substantial fertility declines and appears to be having this effect in Southern and Eastern African countries. Both birth postponement and the slow decline in African fertility, he suggested, are mediated by institutional factors that cause people to feel economically insecure.
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From page 26... ...
Features such as universal marriage for both sexes, early marriage for girls, prompt remarriage for widowed and divorced women, and polygamy tend to mean that women spend most of their reproductive life in a union, with their social status focused on their role as mother and wife. Hertrich explored the connections between long-term trends in nuptiality and the timing of fertility in sub-Saharan Africa by asking three questions: 1.
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From page 27... ...
Hertrich concluded that these data demonstrate that a fertility decline is not possible where the age at first marriage is below 18 -- and she noted that in most cases fertility begins to decline after the median age reaches 19 years. THE IMPACT OF SOCIOECONOMIC TRENDS Eloundou-Enyegue's focus was on ways to understand how individual processes add up to trends that can be discerned at the national level.
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From page 28... ...
28 FIGURE 3-3 Long-term trends in age at marriage and total fertility rates. SOURCE: Hertrich (2015)
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From page 29... ...
They are often also limited by endogeneity -- the confounding effect of variables that affect the outcome Figure 3-4, fixed image but are not measured. One is that these approaches tend to be based on an assumption that processes remain constant across the fertility transition.
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From page 30... ...
The top graph shows a scenario in which more-educated women experience the decline much more rapidly than less-educated women do, which means that there is considerable inequality between the two groups during the middle phase of the transi Fertility Lower Educ Higher Educ Time Fertility Inequality Spillover Behavioral Compositional FIGURE 3-5 Two hypotheses about the pattern of fertility transition. SOURCE: Eloundou-Enyegue (2015)
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From page 31... ...
They reviewed three primary factors that influence fertility: the reproductive behavior of individual women or couples, as indicated by changes in their fertility preferences or contraceptive behaviors; socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of sub-populations; and institutional factors such as shifts in policy or service delivery environments. Kenya and Ghana experienced similar patterns of fertility decline starting in 1970: a rapid decline followed by a stall and a plateau.
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From page 32... ...
NOTE: Y axis indicates percentage using modern contraceptives. SOURCE: Ndugga (2015)
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From page 33... ...
Both countries have established multiple policies and programs designed to reduce fertility, Ndugga noted, but implementation has not been effective enough to allow the programs to achieve desired results. Both countries rely on donor funding to implement their strategies, and major funding gaps have hampered thorough implementation.
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From page 34... ...
Another participant suggested that women may not always choose to be candid in response to questions about their contraceptive use and that researchers need to find additional means to understand their views. For example, this participant noted that Ghana appears to have achieved significant declines in fertility rates even though women there appear to be quite resistant to modern contraceptive methods.
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