Kenyan women have more children, especially in rural areas, than in most developing nations. This is widely believed to be an impediment to Kenya’s economic development. Thus, factors influencing family size in the Kenyan context are important for its future. A brief review of economic theories of fertility leads to the conclusion that both economics and social/cultural factors must be considered simultaneously when examining factors that determine the number of children in a family. The need to do this is borne out in Kenya’s situation by utilising responses from a random sample of rural households in the Nyeri district of Kenya. Economic and social/cultural factors intertwine to influence family sizes in this district. After providing a summary of the main statistical results from the survey, we use multiple regression analysis to explore the influences of a woman’s age, level of education, whether she has outside employment, whether the family keeps livestock, whether she expresses a preference for more boys than girls, whether the family uses only family labour (including child labour) and the size of the farm, which is used as a proxy for family income. It was found that preference for male children has an important positive influence on family size in this district. Women were found to have greater preference for male children than their male counterparts possibly because of their fear of being disinherited if they do not produce an heir for their husbands. Preference for sons was also found in allocation of human capital resources at the household level in that the female respondents were found to have lower levels of education than their male counterparts. Various long-term policies are outlined that may help to reduce the number of offspring of women in Kenya.

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Family size economics and child gender preference: a case study in the Nyeri district of Kenya.

BACKGROUND Little is known about even the relatively recent demographic history of Africa, because of the lack of data. Elsewhere, historical demographic trends have been reconstructed by applying family reconstitution to church records. Such data also exist throughout Africa from the late 19th century. For the Counting Souls Project, nearly one million records from the oldest Catholic parishes in East and Central Africa have been digitised. These data are currently being processed into a relational database. The aim of this paper is to describe their potential for demographic reconstruction in the region, and to outline how their provenance defines the analytical approach. RESULTS Empirically, religion is correlated with population patterns in contemporary Africa, and, historically, reproduction and family formation were central to Christian mission in the region. Measuring change using sources created by agents of change raises questions of epistemology, causation, and selection bias. This paper describes how these concerns are balanced by missionary determination to follow the intimate lives of their parishioners, to monitor their 'souls', and to measure their morality, fidelity, and faith. This intimate recording means that the African parish registers, together with related sources such as missionary diaries and letters and oral histories, describe qualitatively and quantitatively what happens to individual agency (reproductive decision-making) when the moral hegemony shifts (via evangelisation and colonisation), and how the two interact in a reciprocal process of change. CONCLUSION Reconstructing long-term demographic trends using parish registers in Africa is therefore more than simply generating rates and testing their reliability. It is a bigger description of how 'decision rules' are structured and re-structured, unpicking the cognitive seam between individual and culture by exploring dynamic micro-interactions between reproduction, honour, hope, and modernity over the long term. With such a mixed-methods approach, parish registers offer real potential for historical demography in Africa.

/pdf/counting-souls-towards-an-historical-demography-of-africa-2fh7b50hdr.pdf

Counting Souls: Towards an historical demography of Africa.

Censuses were held and data subsequently published in Nigeria in 1952/3 and 1963. Age data and other aspects of the enumerations gave rise to considerable doubts. In 1969 the Demographic Training and Research Unit of the University of Ife carried out a census of ages amongst 10,000 persons in the Western State of Nigeria employing in succession orthodox methods, supporting historical records, and two approaches involving the identification of single-year cohorts of contemporaries. Certain other data were also collected for explanatory purposes. The project confirmedthe tendency for age misstatement to exaggerate the number of females aged 20–44 and the number of older males, and to understate the number of persons aged 0–9 and females aged 50–59. It was shown that amongst females, aged 15–24, there is a significant tendency for the ages of the unmarried to be understated and those of the married, expecially those of higher parity, to be overstated. Such tendencies may be reduced by any type of en...

An experiment with census-type age enumeration in Nigeria.

Provides a sketch of Bangladesh’s socio-economic performance in the light of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals. After providing some background on these goals and on Bangladesh, this article considers trends in the incidence of poverty and hunger in Bangladesh, access to education and gender equality in Bangladesh, child mortality and maternal health, the incidence of important diseases in Bangladesh and Bangladesh’s progress in achieving environmental sustainability, particularly in relation to its use and development of its energy resources. In addition, Bangladesh’s involvement in global partnerships providing financial and other assistance to it are considered. Bangladesh’s Performance and the Millennium Development Goals: A Sketch of Progress

https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:350378/UQ350378_fulltext.pdf

Social economics, policy and development

Whatever proximate variables are examined, their differential effects on rural and urban fertility are small. This indicates that no major disturbance has taken place in urban or rural reproductive norms. However, two possible reasons for the converging pattern of rural and urban fertility in Nigeria are identified. One is that urban mothers in the first half of the childbearing age range have higher fertility than their rural counterparts. The other is that breast-feeding and post-partum abstinence, which are the major determinants of marital fertility, exert a more depressing influence on rural than urban fertility.

Determinants of rural and urban fertility differentials in Nigeria.

The paper attempts to glean some information on differential fertility from data obtained in a survey of selected urban and rural communities in Western Nigeria. The results show that the attitudes of rural women are far more favourable to high fertility than those of urban women, though for both groups the modal number of children preferred is five or six. The analysis also yields a total fertility of nearly six and an average family size of about five for both groups. No conclusive evidence of rural-urban fertility differentials has, however, been found. All that can be said on the basis of the available data is that the level of fertility in Western Nigeria is currently very high and that urban fertility is probably as high as rural fertility, though the probability of much larger errors in the rural than in the urban data may imply somewhat higher rural fertility.

Olusanya Po

Papers

Rural-urban fertility differentials in Western Nigeria.