Fertility responses to natural disaster in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

In the light of the growing frequency and intensity of natural disasters, and its detrimental consequences on rural livelihoods in Sub-Saharan Africa, this thesis contributes to the existing literature by investigating how fertility responds to both risk and shocks of natural disaster in Sub-Saharan Africa. We geographically link data on natural disasters from the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) with socioeconomic and fertility data from 44 rounds of repeated cross-sectional Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) conducted between 1993 and 2018 across 107 regions within 18 Sub-Saharan Africa countries. Using OLS fixed effect models, we observe a positive relationship between fertility and risk of natural disasters for women whose households own agricultural land. This finding further provides empirical evidence for the insurance strategy, which suggests that parents utilize their children as a means of insurance in response to heightened income uncertainties resulting from natural disasters. Landowner women in Western Africa have a negative association between fertility and natural disaster shocks, whereas in Central Africa, there is a positive correlation. These inconclusive results may be explained by the households’ trade-off between the advantages of having children with the costs of raising and households’ current consumption, healthcare disruption, maternal and child health, employment, bonding time, and migration, following natural disasters.