Impact of Women Education on Fertility: A case study of The Gambia

Abstract: This research contributes to the ongoing debate on whether women's education and fertility are inversely related. It is seen that during the premodern era, the number of children born per woman was high and the only thing that kept population growth low was the high death rate. However, the modernization of societies resulted in a reduction in the number of births per woman. Hence the causes of this reduction in the number of births rate are subject to debate. Thus, this paper seeks to inquire whether empowering women through education could be a cause for this reduction in the number of children per woman(fertility) in The Gambia. The 2013 wave of Demographic and Health Survey Data of the Gambia was employed in a cross-sectional study using negative binomial regressions. The result for educational attainment, suggests that women with primary, secondary, and higher levels of education will have a lower number of children compared to women with no education. This estimate for educational level agrees with many works of literature on fertility. Thus, the paper concludes that education is negatively related to fertility.