Womens labour force participation and fertility in Nairobi

Abstract

The past two decades have witnessed notable advances in studies seeking to illuminate potential connections between women's roles and demographic phenomena Whereas in more developed countries, an inverse relationship is most often observed between women's productive and reproductive activities, in less industrialized countries the relationship is not clear This study used data from the Nairobi Urban 1ntegration Project to examine the relationship between women's labour force participation and fertility in Nairobi Specifically, the study examined the extent to which labour force participation influences fertility and the extent to which participation in the formal/ informal sector influences fertility. The study was based on a sub sample of 864 women covering three generations aged 25-54 from whom retrospective data on birth and employment histories were collected. The analysis was based on an additive model used by Mason (1981) but with modification to suit the variables of interest Descriptive "'., ... statistics were used to show the distribution of observation periods and a summary of survival data showed that 417 of the women had experienced a birth at end of the reference period with 50% having at least one birth. The main method of data analysis was event history analysis. Specifically, Cox's proportional Hazards model was used to establish the effect of several co-variates on the hazard rate of getting a next child -during the observation period The risk involves multiple failures since childbearing is a repeated event. It was important to restrict the analysis to women who had continuously lived in Nairobi from the age of fifteen since social and demographic analyses ignore the effects of time and space relationships. The study provides evidence of a relationship between women's labour force participation and fertility in airobi. The most important finding is that the relationship is only clear when the settings in which the work is done is considered. This finding indicates that both the employment status and the type of economic sector in which the work is done may have some impact on the extent to which work affects childbearing The study found no fertility differentials between employed and unemployed women despite unemployment reducing the relative risk of getting an additional child. But this observation did not persist when the type of employment sector was considered. At this stage there were significant fertility differentials between employed and unemployed women. Of special interest is the finding that women in the informal sector were less likely to get an additional than those in the formal sector. The observed effects are inconsistent with the role incompatibility theory, but indicate that working conditions in the informal sector in Nairobi may not be compatible with childbearing and child rearing as hypothesized. It could also reflect the current problem of unemployment that has forced people with training suited to the formal sector to enter the informal sector. The exact mechanism of this observed effects were not very clear. There were no fertilitY'diffe;:e;tials between homemakers and employed women in Nairobi but the exact mechanism was not clear. Availability of paid childcare was found to increase the relative risk of getting an additional child, which could be due to the fact that where childcare substitutes are available and considered acceptable women do not feel pressured by time constraints to limit their fertility. This study may have been limited but it has far reaching implications for policy makers It suggests that policies be put in place to promote women's labourforce participation especially in the informal sector since work in this sector has the greatest impact on the rate at which women