Total Fertility Rates

The standard measure of fertility is the Total Fertility Rate (TFR).

Total Fertility Rate is the number of children than a woman has. TFR ranges from 1 in South Korea to 6.9 in Niger (2018 World Bank est.) with the top 25 highest fertility countries in sub-Saharan Africa, mainly from West and Central Africa.

Replacement level fertility is the level of fertility required for each generation to replace itself. Normally, 2 people would need to have 2 children to replace themselves. However at the population level the replacement TFR would have to be greater than 2 to account for the loss of children who will die before reaching adulthood. Replacement level TFR is thus considered to be 2.1 (in high mortality settings however, replacement level fertility would have to be higher because a greater proportion of children die in childhood).

Basic fertility concepts

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. 

International Day of Families

Today is International Day of Families so we are presenting some family characteristics in Ghana over the past two decades using statistics from from five Demographic and Health Surveys (1993, 1998, 2003, 2008 and 2014).