Forecasting Africa’s Fertility Decline by Female Education Groups

Endale Kebede, University of Vienna
Saroja Adhikari, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR)
Wolfgang Lutz, Wittgenstein Centre

While female education has long been recognized as a key driver of fertility decline and most population projection models consider it in their forecasts of overall fertility, there still is need for a method to forecast education-specific fertility trends directly. Here we propose a method for projecting education-specific fertility declines for cohorts of women in Sub-Saharan Africa based on all available DHS data . We study at different levels of aggregation the associations between ideal family size and completed cohort fertility for education groups, on the one hand, and the average level of education in those units, on the other. The consistently very strong empirical associations suggest a plausible narrative by which a higher prevalence of educated women in a spatial unit influence the fertility levels of women in all specific education categories. Empirical associations between education-specific cohort fertility trends and newly available quality-adjusted human capital data are then operationalized to produce education-specific population projections as they are needed for – among other uses – the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP) scenarios that are widely used in the climate change research community. Sensitivity analyses including out-of-sample projections support the validity of the proposed new method.

Keywords: Population projections, forecasts, and estimations, Fertility, Human Capital, Education, and Work

See paper.