Cameroon’s slow fertility transition: A gender perspective

Abstract

We interrogate the proposition that men’s attitudes have constrained the fertility transition in Cameroon, where fertility remains high and contraceptive use low despite much socio-economic progress. We use five Demographic and Health Surveys to compare trends in desired family size among young women and men and analyse matched monogamous couple data from the two most recent surveys to examine wives’ and husbands’ desires to stop childbearing and their relative influence on current contraceptive use. In 2018, average desired family size was 5.6 and 5.1, for young men and women respectively, and this difference (half a child) has not changed since 1998. Among matched couples, the proportions wanting to stop childbearing were similar in wives and their husbands, but wives perceived husbands to be much more pronatalist than themselves. Surprisingly, men’s own reported preferences were more closely associated with contraceptive use than wives’ perceptions of husbands’ preferences. We discerned little evidence that men’s attitudes have impeded reproductive change.

Keywords:

• fertility preferences
• contraception
• matched couples
• men
• youth
• method choice
• Cameroon

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Jean Christophe Fotso and Elihou O. Adje are based at EVIHDAF, Yaoundé, Cameroon. John G. Cleland is based in the Department of Population Health, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, UK, and is an International Advisory Board Member at EVIHDAF.

2 Please direct all correspondence to Jean Christophe Fotso, EVIHDAF, Nouvelle Route Bastos, BP 35328 Yaoundé, Cameroon; or by E-mail: [email protected].

3 Funding: The study was self-funded, with each author covering their own time.

4 Data availability: The data are from a publicly available source, the Demographic and Health Surveys.