Fertility And Number Of Unions: Empirical Evidence From Sub Saharan African Countries

Frank Audrey Tchokonthe, Institut de Formation et de Recherche Demographiques
Honore Mimche, IFORD

The onset of fertility decline that has occurred late and is pursuing more slowly in most African countries than in other developing regions (Gerland and al., 2017). Besides that, African countries face a profound change in their society in term of union, such as the rise of divorces and separations (Clark, 2015), and when we compare Total Children Ever Born (TCEB) between women who have had one union and women who have had more than one union, we observe a significant higher level for the second group. Using 88 DHS women sample datasets from 20 sub Saharan Africa countries, we make use of Poisson regression to determinate the net effect of number of unions on fertility outcomes for each country, by distinguishing weak fertility and high fertility. Then we try to measure the contribution of number of union in fertility level using decomposition method.