Girls' education and fertility transitions: An analysis of recent trends in Tanzania and Uganda

Despite the impact of AIDS on Tanzanian and Ugandan women's health in general, we have limited the scope of this article to the education-fertility relationship in these two countries. Based on our comparison of data from Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) for the two countries, we hypothesize that the absence of a fertility decline among young women in Uganda is caused primarily by intranational factors-especially political instability-that disrupted economic and educational development for almost two decades. Similarly, the fertility decline in Tanzania can be attributed largely to intranational efforts, such as the country's mass education programs of the past 3 decades. Should the educational and political situation in Uganda continue to improve, we predict that the next DHS will show evidence of a fertility decline similar to the one under way in Tanzania.