Education, Fertility Decline, and the Timing of the Second Birth in Sub-Saharan Africa

Jennifer Johnson-Hanks, University of California, Berkeley

The first birth is commonly seen as the onset of a reproductive career, yet in some contexts the second birth constitutes a larger transition in women's status. In much of Africa, educated women now have substantially lower fertility than do the less educated, due largely to lower rates before age 25. Average ages at first childbearing explain only some of this differential; more important is the fact that educated women are more likely than the uneducated to maintain a long interval between the first and second births. By contrast, later birth intervals are not systematically longer among the educated. This paper uses DHS data from 16 sub-Saharan countries alongside ethnographic field data to investigate the role of the first space in understanding African fertility differentials and African fertility decline. I argue that a long first space may enable educated women to combine the potentially conflicting roles of student and mother.