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Women’s empowerment and fertility preferences in high fertility countries in Sub-Saharan Africa

BACKGROUND: Nearly all countries with fertility levels of more than five children per woman are in Sub-Saharan Africa. Prestige, insurance in old age, and replacement in case of child deaths are related to preferences for large families. In this paper, we examine the association between women’s empo...

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Autores principales: Atake, Esso-Hanam, Gnakou Ali, Pitaloumani
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2019
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6451210/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30953494
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12905-019-0747-9
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author Atake, Esso-Hanam
Gnakou Ali, Pitaloumani
author_facet Atake, Esso-Hanam
Gnakou Ali, Pitaloumani
author_sort Atake, Esso-Hanam
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Nearly all countries with fertility levels of more than five children per woman are in Sub-Saharan Africa. Prestige, insurance in old age, and replacement in case of child deaths are related to preferences for large families. In this paper, we examine the association between women’s empowerment and fertility preferences of married women aged 35 years and above in four high fertility Francophone Sub-Saharan Africa (FSSA) countries, namely Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger and Chad. METHOD: The ideal number of children among married women and their ability to have the desired number of children are used to measure fertility preferences. We used principal component analysis to construct a multidimensional empowerment index. We then estimated negative binomial and logistic regression models to examine the association between women’s empowerment and fertility preferences. Data are from the most recent Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) conducted in the countries included in the analysis. RESULTS: Regardless of the country, more empowered women desire significantly fewer children compared with their less empowered counterparts. The first step to having fewer children is formulating programs to improve economic empowerment of women. The specific elements of women’s empowerment that were important for fertility preferences included education, skills development, decision-making power, and control over household resources. In addition, familial empowerment matters more than other dimensions of empowerment in influencing women’s ability to achieve the desired number of children in the FSSA countries included in the study. CONCLUSION: Paid employment and access to and control over resources are factors which, if improved upon, could significantly reduce the ideal number of children. By taking necessary steps, mass media can be used much more adequately to reduce ideal number of children in FSSA countries. In addition, the desire for many children could also be due to their participation in income-generating activities to improve the household’s socio-economic status. The findings suggests that improvement of women’s ability to have the desired number of children is a big challenge to which policy makers must pay careful attention.
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spelling pubmed-64512102019-04-16 Women’s empowerment and fertility preferences in high fertility countries in Sub-Saharan Africa Atake, Esso-Hanam Gnakou Ali, Pitaloumani BMC Womens Health Research Article BACKGROUND: Nearly all countries with fertility levels of more than five children per woman are in Sub-Saharan Africa. Prestige, insurance in old age, and replacement in case of child deaths are related to preferences for large families. In this paper, we examine the association between women’s empowerment and fertility preferences of married women aged 35 years and above in four high fertility Francophone Sub-Saharan Africa (FSSA) countries, namely Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger and Chad. METHOD: The ideal number of children among married women and their ability to have the desired number of children are used to measure fertility preferences. We used principal component analysis to construct a multidimensional empowerment index. We then estimated negative binomial and logistic regression models to examine the association between women’s empowerment and fertility preferences. Data are from the most recent Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) conducted in the countries included in the analysis. RESULTS: Regardless of the country, more empowered women desire significantly fewer children compared with their less empowered counterparts. The first step to having fewer children is formulating programs to improve economic empowerment of women. The specific elements of women’s empowerment that were important for fertility preferences included education, skills development, decision-making power, and control over household resources. In addition, familial empowerment matters more than other dimensions of empowerment in influencing women’s ability to achieve the desired number of children in the FSSA countries included in the study. CONCLUSION: Paid employment and access to and control over resources are factors which, if improved upon, could significantly reduce the ideal number of children. By taking necessary steps, mass media can be used much more adequately to reduce ideal number of children in FSSA countries. In addition, the desire for many children could also be due to their participation in income-generating activities to improve the household’s socio-economic status. The findings suggests that improvement of women’s ability to have the desired number of children is a big challenge to which policy makers must pay careful attention. BioMed Central 2019-04-05 /pmc/articles/PMC6451210/ /pubmed/30953494 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12905-019-0747-9 Text en © The Author(s). 2019 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
spellingShingle Research Article
Atake, Esso-Hanam
Gnakou Ali, Pitaloumani
Women’s empowerment and fertility preferences in high fertility countries in Sub-Saharan Africa
title Women’s empowerment and fertility preferences in high fertility countries in Sub-Saharan Africa
title_full Women’s empowerment and fertility preferences in high fertility countries in Sub-Saharan Africa
title_fullStr Women’s empowerment and fertility preferences in high fertility countries in Sub-Saharan Africa
title_full_unstemmed Women’s empowerment and fertility preferences in high fertility countries in Sub-Saharan Africa
title_short Women’s empowerment and fertility preferences in high fertility countries in Sub-Saharan Africa
title_sort women’s empowerment and fertility preferences in high fertility countries in sub-saharan africa
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6451210/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30953494
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12905-019-0747-9
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