2000 ANNUAL REPORT
Does children's schooling help reduce the fertility of their parents?

Time and again research has shown that the more education a girl receives, the fewer children she is likely to bear. In 2000, however, research conducted by Cynthia B. Lloyd and her colleagues confirmed an additional influence of education. They showed that the widespread availability of education for children, particularly girls, can lead to a reduction in the fertility of their mothers, even if those women are uneducated.

The noted demographer and former Council trustee John Caldwell hypothesized in 1980 that the onset of the fertility transition in developing countries would be triggered when most girls and boys attend primary school. Underlying this theory is the assumption that once schooling is widely available and acceptable, parents will curtail their fertility so that they can invest more of their scarce resources in each of their children. In 2000, Lloyd and her colleagues published the results of studies examining the correlation between schooling and fertility in 23 sub-Saharan African countries and in 12 rural communities in Pakistan.

In comparing the fertility data with the schooling data in sub-Saharan Africa, the investigators found that education has a much greater influence on fertility once schooling becomes widespread. (The researchers defined the attainment of mass schooling as the time when 75 percent of 15–19-year-olds have completed four years of schooling.) Prior to the attainment of mass schooling, for example, a 10 percent increase in grade four attainment had virtually no influence on fertility. By contrast, after schooling had become prevalent, the same increase in grade four attainment led to a 17 percent decline in fertility. Furthermore, those countries that had made the most progress in the fertility transition were those that had been earliest in reaching mass schooling for girls.

In Pakistan, according to program associate Zeba A. Sathar, lead author of the study conducted there, “communities that had overall higher schooling enrollments were the very ones with higher contraceptive prevalence.” The researchers also used a statistical simulation to determine the potential effect of adding girls’ schools to communities that had none. They found that an increase from no girls’ schools to two girls’ schools in each community would increase by 14 to 15 percentage points the probability that a mother would express a desire to stop childbearing and act on that desire by practicing family planning.

“Our empirical results from Africa and Asia strongly support Caldwell’s original hypothesis about the link between the achievement of mass schooling, particularly girls, and the onset of the fertility transition,” says Lloyd. “In countries where mass schooling has yet to be attained, fertility declines will likely proceed much more slowly.”