Religious affiliation, education, and fertility in sub-Saharan Africa

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is a weakly secularized region, where religions play an important place in the lives of individuals and communities. In many countries, religious currents are involved in the structuring of educational offer, while the increase in women’s level of education is considered as a major driver of the fertility decline. In this article, we raise the question if and in how far the association between female education and fertility depends on religion. We test this interaction by using Demographic and Health surveys (earliest and most recent available) for a corpus of 23 Sub-Saharan African countries.

We find that the association between female education and fertility does not differ between religious groups in the vast majority of Sub-Saharan countries, implying that globally, religion does not weaken the negative educational gradient of fertility in this region. Our results strongly suggest that education takes on an emancipatory function by modifying the reproductive norms of women, independent of their religious background.