42 / 84
The Economist
September 22nd 2018
Middle East and Africa 41
2
muchmore urban than east Africa, but has
a higher fertility rate.
Three things could drastically change
the picture, however. First, more African
governments could promote family plan-
ning. Ethiopia, Malawi and Rwanda have
done so, and their birth rates are dropping
faster than average. Perhaps the starkest
change is in Kenya. Alex Ezeh of the Centre
for Global Development, a think-tank in
Washington, remembers showing Kenyan
politicians evidence that wealthy people
both desired and had small families,
whereas the poor wanted large families
and ended up with even larger ones. The
government invested in clinics and propa-
ganda, to some effect. Household surveys
show that 53% of married Kenyan women
used effective contraception in 2014, up
from 32% in 2003. Kenya’s neighbour, Tan-
zania, is at least a decade behind.
The second cause for optimism is edu-
cation. Broadly, the more girls go to school
in a country, the lower that country’s birth
rate. This seems to be more than just a cor-
relation: several studies, in Africa and else-
where, have found that schooling actually
depresses fertility. Toattend school—evena
lousy school where you barely learn to
read—is to gain a little independence and
learn about opportunities that your par-
ents had not envisaged for you.
Researchers at the International Insti-
tute for Applied Systems Analysis in Aus-
tria suggest that Africa’s schools are about
to drive a large change. They point out that
education spendingweakened in someAf-
rican countries in the 1980s as govern-
ments scrambled to cut budget deficits.
Girls’ schooling, which had been increas-
ing, flattened. It is probably not a coinci-
dence that African fertility rates fell little in
the 2000s, when that thinly educated co-
hort reached womanhood. But school en-
rolments have risen since then. If educa-
tion really makes for smaller families, that
will soon be apparent.
The third profound change would be
stability in the Sahel. The semi-arid belt
that stretches through Burkina Faso, Chad,
Mali, Niger, northern Nigeria and Sudan is
lawless in parts and universally poor.
Child death rates are still shockingly high
in places. Partly as a result, and also be-
cause women’s power in the Sahel is un-
dermined by widespread polygamy, peo-
ple still desire many children. The most
recent household survey of Niger, in 2012,
found that the average woman thought
nine the ideal number.
Progress on all three counts depends
mostly on African politicians. It falls to
them to create more and better schools,
provide security for their people and in-
vest in family planning. They, not foreign
observers, need to conclude that their
countries would be wealthier if they had
rather fewer children. Like somuch in Afri-
ca, almost everything depends on the
quality of government. And that, sadly, is
hard to decree.
7
2
Africa is different
Sources: IMF;
UN Population Division
*Purchasing-power parity
GDP and fertility
GDP per person, constant 2011 $’000 at PPP*
Fertility rate, births per woman
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
0 1 2 3 4 5 6
Nigeria
Tanzania
1990
1990
2016
2016
India
1990
2016
Child marriage
Growing up too early
I
NAdusty village in southernNiger,
Fatia holds her daughter close to her
breast, smiling, though the baby looks
much too large for her. Four years ago she
married at the age of16, she reckons, but
shemay have been younger. Since then
she has had two children.
Three out of four girls inNiger are
married before they are 18, giving this
poorwest African country theworld’s
highest rate of childmarriage. TheWorld
Bank says it is one of only a very small
number to have seen no reduction in
recent years; the rate has even risen slight-
ly. The country’sminimum legal age of
marriage for girls is 15, but some brides
are as young as nine.
Across Africa childmarriage stub-
bornly persists. Of the roughly 700m
women living todaywhoweremarried
before theywere 18, 125mare African.
Among poor rural families like Fatia’s the
rate has not budged since 1990. The
UN
Children’s Fund (
UNICEF)
estimates that,
on current trends, almost half theworld’s
child brides by 2050will be African.
But some countries have shown they
can keep young girls out ofwedlock. In
Ethiopia, once amongAfrica’s top five
countries for childmarriage, the practice
has dropped by a third in the past decade,
theworld’s sharpest decline, says the
World Bank. The government wants to
eradicate childmarriage entirely by 2025.
Ethiopia offers lessons for other Afri-
can countries. For one thing, it shows that
in religious societies youmust win over
imams and priests. Guday Emirie of
Addis Ababa University notes that in one
district a local priest, having been public-
ly shamed formarrying offhis own
daughterwhen shewas a child, has since
been preaching against the practice. It has
nowbeen eliminated in his district.
Conservative imams inNiger, by contrast,
often invoke the Prophet’smarriage to a
young girl, according to tradition.
After a decade of strong economic
growth, Ethiopia’s poverty rate is now
half that inNiger, one of theworld’s
poorest countries. Many of its people,
says Lakshmi SundaramofGirls Not
Brides, an
NGO,
believe that “childmar-
riage is away of reducing the number of
mouths to feed”, as the bridemoves in
with another family.
Education is evenmore vital. “You
generally don’t find a child bride in
school,” notes a
UNICEF
expert in Ethio-
pia. Its government spendsmore on
education as a proportion of its budget
than other African countries. More than a
third of its girls, a big increase, enrol in
secondary schools. InNiger the figure is
less than a fifth.
Curbing childmarriage could lower
fertility rates by about a tenth in coun-
tries like Niger and Ethiopia. Doing so
would immeasurably improve the lives
ofwomen like Fatia. On herwedding
night, she says she begged her husband
not to force himself on her. “Hewas
bigger thanme. It hurt toomuch,” she
says, looking down at her daughter.
ADDIS ABABA AND NIAMEY
Childmarriage is proving stubbornlypersistent
Cradle snatchers
Sources: World Bank; International
Centre for Research on Women
Share of women married
before 18, by age group
2017, %
0
20 40 60 80
Egypt
Indonesia
Pakistan
Ivory Coast
Senegal
Congo
Zambia
Mauritania
Uganda
Mozambique
Nigeria
India
Ethiopia
Mali
Bangladesh
Chad
Niger
18-22 23-30