Forecasting Africa’s fertility decline by female education groups

While female education has long been recognized as a key driver of fertility decline during the process of demographic transition and most population projection models consider it implicitly or explicitly 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 demographic and health surveys data for African countries (including 1.03Mio cases). We study at different levels of aggregation (sample clusters, strata, and national) 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 influences the fertility levels of women in all specific education categories. Empirical associations between education-specific cohort fertility trends at the national level and newly available quality-adjusted human capital data for these cohorts are then operationalized to produce education-specific population projections as they are needed for—among other uses—the shared socioeconomic pathways scenarios that are widely used in the climate change research community. Sensitivity analyses including out-of-sample projections support the validity of the proposed method which is then applied to 37 African countries.