Fertility, one of the population processes is defined as the number of children born to a woman.
What is known as fertility (i.e. the physical ability to have children) in conventional language is referred to as fecundity by demographers.
Fertility is determined by two main factors - biological and behavioural. The behavioural factors exert a greater influence on fertility than the social factors.
The biological factors influence fecundity and it is mainly the age of a woman that determines her physical ability to have children. Women are fecund in what is known as the reproductive ages (i.e. between puberty and menopause). The age range 15-49 years is typically considered the reproductive years for women.
The behavioural factors that can determine fertility comprises a number of social, economic and demographic characteristics of women and also their partners. Factors such as education (women with less education tend to have more children), socioeconomic status (poorer women tend to have fewer children), employment (women who are not in the labour force tend to have children; women in the informal sector tend to have more children) etc. In addition, ethnicity, religion and cultural beliefs and practices can all affect how many children a woman has.
The graphs below illustrate some of the differences in fertility by the socio-demographic characteristics of women.
