Women's Educational Attainment and Fertility Transition in Sub-Saharan Africa

David Shapiro, Pennsylvania State University
Lisa Strunk, Pennsylvania State University
Tesfayi Gebreselassie, Pennsylvania State University

During the last decade or so of the 20th century, fertility transition in sub-Saharan Africa became increasingly evident in a growing number of countries (Tabutin, 1997; Cohen, 1998; Tabutin and Schoumaker, 2001; Shapiro and Tambashe, 2002). A few countries have witnessed substantial and rapid fertility decline, and numerous other countries appear to be at various early stages of fertility transition. A number of factors have been identified in the literature as contributing to this emerging fertility transition, including increasing levels of education, increases in age at marriage, greater contraceptive use, declining infant and child mortality, and economic crisis, among others. This paper focuses on the role of women's educational attainment as a factor contributing to fertility decline in sub-Saharan Africa. More specifically, we seek to examine the importance of increasing educational attainment levels for the ongoing fertility decline. This entails looking both at the changes in educational attainment that have been taking place in the region and at the relationships between education and fertility. In this latter regard, we use data from Demographic and Health Surveys of nearly 30 countries in sub-Saharan Africa to examine the relationships between educational attainment and a number of proximate determinants of fertility, and between education and overall fertility as well as age-specific fertility rates. From a theoretical perspective, Easterlin's work (Easterlin, 1975; Easterlin and Crimmins, 1985) provides a very useful conceptual framework for interpretation of the numerous effects of educational attainment on fertility behavior. In particular, Easterlin's approach, with its emphasis on the demand for and supply of children, the costs of contraception, and the roles of both background characteristics (like education) and proximate determinants of fertility, provides a framework for exploring the effects of education on fertility. These effects are likely to be both direct and indirect, in the latter case reflecting the effects of educational attainment on various proximate determinants of fertility. That is, we anticipate that increased educational attainment of women will be associated with reduced demand for children, increased supply of children, and greater motivation for fertility control, and that these relationships, in turn, will result in women's educational attainment being significantly related to several key proximate determinants of fertility. There are three substantive parts to the paper. First, we explore changes in the educational attainment of women in sub-Saharan Africa that took place in the latter half of the 20th century. Colclough and Lewin (1993) and Schultz (1993) have documented the growth in women's schooling that took place in the region, especially following independence in the late 1950s and 1960s. At the same time, summary data from the World Bank (2002) suggest that the sharp increases in women's access to education that took place in the 1960s and 1970s were curtailed and even reversed in the 1980s and 1990s (for example, gross primary enrollment rates for sub-Saharan Africa rose sharply from only 51% in 1970 to 81% in 1982, but then fell to 76 percent by the early 1990s and were 78 percent as of 1996). As a point of departure, then, we will provide a current assessment of the state of and trends in women's schooling and educational attainment in the region. The second part of the paper consists of an overview of DHS data in which we examine the relationships between women's educational attainment, on the one hand, and various proximate determinants of fertility such as age at first union and first birth, contraceptive use, and postpartum behaviors (breast-feeding, abstinence). In addition, pursuing lines of inquiry suggested by Easterlin's approach, we examine the relationships between educational attainment and infant and child mortality, ideal number of children, and actual fertility behavior. For these and subsequent analyses, we distinguish among three educational attainment groups: women with no schooling, those with some or completed primary education, and women with secondary or higher education. While this three-way classification is fairly basic and ignores distinctions that are likely to be relevant in some cases – e.g., incomplete primary vs. completed primary, secondary vs. post-secondary – it facilitates comparisons across countries. Our own work on Kinshasa (Shapiro, 1996; Shapiro and Tambashe, 1997, 2003) as well as findings by other researchers (e.g., Ainsworth et al., 1996; Muhuri et al., 1994) suggest that increased acquisition of secondary education is likely to be especially relevant in contributing to fertility decline. The gross associations between education and each of the variables to be considered in the second part of the paper provide a starting point for consideration of the likely impact of increasing educational attainment on fertility. However, these gross associations are affected by other, confounding factors as well. For example, better-educated women are considerably more likely to be urban than rural residents, and at the same time, urban residence is associated with lower fertility, ceteris paribus (Shapiro and Tambashe, 2002). Hence, some part of the observed gross differences by educational attainment in fact reflects associated differences in the likelihood of urban residence. Given the likely impact of other factors such as urban residence, then, the third substantive part of the paper will consist of multivariate analyses of the DHS data. These analyses follow the approach used by Shapiro and Tambashe (2002), and examine age-specific fertility rates in urban and rural areas of each of the different countries in the region in which a DHS survey has been carried out. However, we extend the approach used in that earlier paper to explicitly consider the role of education via estimation of reduced-form equations that initially control for women's educational attainment and urban residence only. These equations highlight the importance of educational attainment for determination of overall fertility, even after taking account of urban residence. Further, supplementary equations are estimated and discussed, in which key proximate determinants of fertility such as proportions married and contraceptive behavior, as well as infant and child mortality, are examined vis-à-vis their relationships to women's educational attainment. These multivariate results highlight several important mechanisms through which women's educational attainment affects fertility behavior. The concluding section of the paper will summarize and discuss our findings, and we will also explore the prospects for ongoing fertility transition in sub-Saharan Africa. References Ainsworth, Martha, Kathleen Beegle, and Andrew Nyamete. 1996. "The Impact of Women's Schooling on Fertility and Contraceptive Use: A Study of Fourteen Sub-Saharan African Countries." World Bank Economic Review, Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 85-122. 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