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.
Publisher
University of Nairobi
Subject
Desired Family Sizes In KenyaRights
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United StatesUsage Rights
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/Collections
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