EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Cameroon’s slow fertility transition: A gender perspective

Jean Christophe Fotso, John G. Cleland and Elihou O. Adje

Population Studies, 2024, vol. 78, issue 1, 79-91

Abstract: We interrogate the proposition that men’s attitudes have constrained the fertility transition in Cameroon, where fertility remains high and contraceptive use low despite much socio-economic progress. We use five Demographic and Health Surveys to compare trends in desired family size among young women and men and analyse matched monogamous couple data from the two most recent surveys to examine wives’ and husbands’ desires to stop childbearing and their relative influence on current contraceptive use. In 2018, average desired family size was 5.6 and 5.1, for young men and women respectively, and this difference (half a child) has not changed since 1998. Among matched couples, the proportions wanting to stop childbearing were similar in wives and their husbands, but wives perceived husbands to be much more pronatalist than themselves. Surprisingly, men’s own reported preferences were more closely associated with contraceptive use than wives’ perceptions of husbands’ preferences. We discerned little evidence that men’s attitudes have impeded reproductive change.

Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00324728.2023.2297687 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rpstxx:v:78:y:2024:i:1:p:79-91

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rpst20

DOI: 10.1080/00324728.2023.2297687

Access Statistics for this article

Population Studies is currently edited by John Simons, Francesco Billari, James J. Brown, John Cleland, Andrew Foster, John McDonald, Tom Moultrie, Mikko Myrsklä, Alice Reid, Wendy Sigle-Rushton, Ronald Skeldon and Frans Willekens

More articles in Population Studies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-20
Handle: RePEc:taf:rpstxx:v:78:y:2024:i:1:p:79-91