Fertility

Samuel Agyei-Mensah, University of Ghana

This paper charts the trajectory of the African fertility decline over the past 50 years and provides a critical assessment of the scholarly perspectives that have characterized the approach to African fertility since the 1960s. It examines published literature, with a focus on analyses of the demographic surveys (WFS and DHS) conducted over this period. Issues that have been in the forefront and featured in this paper include: high and declining fertility; pauses and stalls in fertility decline; wanted and unwanted fertility; neighborhoods and fertility; and the notion of a four-birth African reproductive regime. The paper offers a synopsis of the empirical pattern of African fertility decline to date while at the same time challenging some of the dominant scholarly approaches in the past and the present.