| dc.description.abstract | The 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) held in
Cairo emphasized ‘the right of men and women to be informed and to have access to
safe, effective, affordable and acceptable methods of family planning of their choice, as
well as other methods of their choice for regulation of fertility which are not against the
law’. These rights rest on the recognition of the basic right of all couples and individuals
to decide freely and responsibly the number, spacing and timing of their children. Thus,
various national governments have demonstrated their support for these resolutions by
promoting contraceptive use in many ways. However, the question remains as to what
extent couples have been able to implement their fertility desires. The need therefore
exists to examine the extent to which observed changes in fertility in developing countries
can be explained by the ability of individuals or couples to implement their fertility
desires through informed choice of family planning methods
In this study, we applied Bongaarts variant of Easterlin’s supply-demand framework for
the analysis of fertility to the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data from sixty
developing countries to estimate the level of preference implementation. Decomposition
of the determinants of fertility was done using 27 of the 60 countries, which has data sets
before and after the 1994 ICPD. The regression of preference implementation on the
1998 United Nations Human Development Index was also done to establish the
relationship between the two.
The result shows variation in the values of preference implementation especially between
the countries of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and others. It is shown that the attainment of
couple’s fertility preference is quite low in SSA. The decomposition procedure shows that
preference implementation is a more important determinant of fertility decline than
wanted fertility. The importance of the degree of preference implementation and the
implication of this finding is discussed. The need for further investigation into the use of
degree of preference implementation in demographic research is emphasized. | en |
