Understanding the urban-rural fertility divide in sub-Saharan Africa: The critical role of social isolation

Current models inadequately address the role of information transfer in explaining the slow fertility decline in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) in the 1990s and 2000s. We posit that an important reason for this slow decline was the high level of social isolation of the rural population in the region, as a result of which new ideas regarding fertility had difficulty reaching them. Applying Poisson regression to survey data on 180,000 women across 25 SSA countries spanning 1995–2010, we find clear associations of travel distance to urban areas and TV ownership with desired and actual fertility. Interaction analyses reveal a compensatory relationship between distance and TV ownership, with the effect of distance almost disappearing for households with a TV and the effect of TV disappearing for households close to urban areas. The role of information access is further stressed by the finding that socioeconomic factors, while highly significant overall, offer limited explanatory value for women living at great distance from urban centres or without TV access. If information transfer is indeed as important as our findings suggest, the increasing availability of smartphones and social media in rural SSA might lead to a faster fertility decline in the region than foreseen by the latest UN population estimates.