Stalls in Africa’s fertility decline partly result from disruptions in female education

Population projections for sub-Saharan Africa have, over the past
decade, been corrected upwards because in a number of countries,
the earlier declining trends in fertility stalled around 2000. While
most studies so far have focused on economic, political, or other
factors around 2000, here we suggest that in addition to those
period effects, the phenomenon also matched up with disruptions
in the cohort trends of educational attainment of women after the
postindependence economic and political turmoil. Disruptions
likely resulted in a higher proportion of poorly educated women
of childbearing age in the late 1990s and early 2000s than there
would have been otherwise. In addition to the direct effects of
education on lowering fertility, these less-educated female cohorts
were also more vulnerable to adverse period effects around
2000. To explore this hypothesis, we combine individual-level data
from Demographic and Health Surveys for 18 African countries
with and without fertility stalls, thus creating a pooled dataset
of more than two million births to some 670,000 women born from
1950 to 1995 by level of education. Statistical analyses indicate clear
discontinuities in the improvement of educational attainment of subsequent
cohorts of women and stronger sensitivity of less-educated
women to period effects. We assess the magnitude of the effect of
educational discontinuity through a comparison of the actual trends
with counterfactual trends based on the assumption of no education
stalls, resulting in up to half a child per woman less in 2010 and 13
million fewer live births over the 1995–2010 period.