Is stalled fertility in Africa a late consequence of stalled female education due to Structural Adjustment Programs in the 1980s?

Wolfgang Lutz, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)
Anne Goujon, Wittgenstein Centre (IIASA, VID/ÖAW, WU)
Samir K.C., Wittgenstein Centre (IIASA, VID/ÖAW, WU)

Recent stalls in fertility decline have been observed in a few countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and no plausible common reason has been identified in the literature so far. The paper develops the hypothesis that these fertility stalls are partly associated with stalls in the progress of education among women of the relevant cohorts resulting from the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) during the 1980s. We descriptively link the change in the education composition of subsequent cohorts of young women in Sub-Saharan Africa and the recent fertility stalls, using reconstructed data on population by age, sex and level of education from the Wittgenstein Centre Data Explorer and fertility rates from the United Nations. If the descriptive findings are corroborated through more detailed cohort specific fertility analysis, it will have important implications for the projections of population growth in affected countries such as Nigeria.