Factors Influencing the Differences in Actual and Desired Family Sizes in Kenya

Abstract

The International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) held in 1994 gave couples a chance to make informed choices on how many children they wanted; making reproductive health a right and allowing them to exercise this without coercion or force. This basic right allows couples forge informed decisions on spacing, timing, and number of children; factors that have been supported by governments across the world through deliberate actions such as availing of family planning and contraceptive aids . To what extent are couples actually able to implement such fertility desires in Sub-Saharan Africa, creates a need for which this study sought to fill. The study utilized the 2014 Kenya Demographic and Health Survey (KDHS) data from where a selection of 5992 women 15-49 years old who have theoretically completed reproduction (who do not want any more children, who are sterilized and declared infecund and also gave a numeric reply to what their desired number of children was). Conceptually, the variant of Easterlin’s supply-demand framework provides a simplified framework to determine the socioeconomic together with demographic factors that bring about differences in actual and desired family sizes across the country. The results show a variation in the significance of each variable on fertility desire. It is observed that region, wealth index, highest education level, the age of the respondent and marital status are significant predictors for women ending up with fewer children than they desire. Marital status and current use of contraceptive method are significant factors for women getting more children than they desire. From the findings, this study recognizes the importance of education as a tool that assists couples to make informed choices on fertility desires, underscores the need for family planning as well as providing a linkage between socioeconomic and demographic factors and why family sizes cannot be precisely attained. The study builds on the existing knowledge that confirm the role played by education, together with the introduction of deliberate family-control programs and contraceptive utilization to reducing the number of newborns a woman expects at completion of her reproductive years. There is a need to do a longitudinal survey following women through their reproductive years to fully comprehend the reasons for the varying differences in the number of actual and desired family across regions in Kenya. For further research, it is recommended that more work is conducted to understand how much impact the eroding cultural values have on overall fertility and where possible, be used in the design and development of fertility programs. In addition, more work is required on the importance of choice in relation to the factors responsible for the number of children one attains at the end their fertility career.