Socioeconomic Status and Fertility Decline in Burkina Faso, 2003-2015

Abstract

The paper proposes to clarify whether fertility decline in Burkina Faso between 2003 and 2015 is explained by the differential distributions (composition effect and response effect) with focus on socioeconomic status (women’s education, women’s occupation and poverty). Using data from 2003 demographic and health survey (DHS) and 2015 demographic and health module of the Multisectoral Continuous Survey, we applied an extension of Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition approach to quantify the percentage of fertility decline attributable to distribution of the socio-economic status (composition effect) and the percentage attributable to women’s fertility behavior (response effect) attributable to socio-economic status. We find the fertility decline is mainly explain to changes in the distribution of women according the different factors. Indeed, the composition effect represents 88% and only 12% for the response effect.  Moreover, composition effect for socio-economic factors is estimated to 85.13% and the response effect is estimated to 34.23%. These results suggest (i) to encourage girl’s education by enrolling them in school but particularly by ensuring that they go at least to secondary school; (ii) create a minimum package of services for the promotion of modern methods of contraception, particularly for women working in agriculture and trade sector as well as those from poor households and living in rural areas; (iii) promote domestic work to allow more women to be interested.