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The Effects of Family Planning Programs on Wanted and Unwanted Fertility in Sub-Saharan Africa

John Bongaarts, Population Council

Many policymakers in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) have been reluctant to invest in family planning programs, despite the success of these programs in other developing regions. A key cause of this reluctance is that the literature on the impact of family planning programs remains contentious. In 1994, Lant Pritchett made the controversial claim that fertility declines in LDCs are largely driven by declines in wanted fertility and not by reductions in unwanted births resulting from program interventions. This claim led to a vigorous and still unsettled debate. Several subsequent studies concluded that Pritchett’s analysis was flawed. The objective here is to revisit this debate and try to settle it with new analyses using DHS data. The paper will 1) Update decompositions of the effects of unwanted fertility on overall fertility trends, and 2) Estimate the effects of FP programs on wanted as well as unwanted fertility in SSA. The main conclusion is that FP programs had a substantial impact not only on unwanted fertility but also on wanted fertility. As a result, FP can be successful in SSA where the desired family size is still high, as has been demonstrated by high-quality programs in several countries (e.g. Ethiopia, Malawi and Rwanda).

Keywords: Policy evaluation, Family planning and contraception, Fertility and childbirth, Decomposition analysis/methods

See paper.

  Presented in Session 114. Population Policies and the Demographic Transition