Forecasting Africa's fertility decline by female education groups

Area of Science:

• Demography
• Sociology
• Public Health

Background:

• Female education is a recognized driver of fertility decline in demographic transition.
• Existing population models implicitly or explicitly incorporate education in fertility forecasts.
• There is a need for direct forecasting of education-specific fertility trends.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose and validate a method for projecting education-specific fertility declines for women cohorts in Sub-Saharan Africa.
• To analyze associations between education levels and fertility across different aggregation levels.
• To operationalize empirical associations for improved population projections.

Main Methods:

• Utilized demographic and health surveys data from African countries (1.03 million cases).
• Examined associations between ideal family size, completed cohort fertility, and average education levels at cluster, strata, and national levels.
• Employed quality-adjusted human capital data for national-level trend analysis.

Main Results:

• Consistently strong empirical associations found between higher education prevalence and lower fertility across all education categories.
• The proposed method demonstrates validity through sensitivity analyses and out-of-sample projections.
• The method was successfully applied to 37 African countries.

Conclusions:

• The developed method provides a direct approach to forecasting education-specific fertility.
• Findings support the influence of educated women on fertility trends within all education groups.
• This research contributes to more accurate population projections for socioeconomic and climate change research.