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. 

Greater Accra approaches 10,000 cases as national count reaches 17,741

2,734 new covid-19 cases have been recorded in Ghana since our update last week. Ashanti passed 3,000 cases with Western North and Ashanti moving into triple digit number of cases.

Greater Accra contributed 43% of the new cases (1,167), followed by Ashanti with 26% of new cases (700). Western Region (343) and Eastern (216) contributed 13% and 8% respectively.

How to measure population change

Today we continue our introduction to basic population concepts by reviewing how to measure population change.

Population change over time can be measured in the following ways:

• Natural increase = (Live Births) – (Deaths)
• Net migration = (Immigration) – (Emigration)
• Population growth = (Natural increase) + (Net migration)

All the indicators of population change can be:

• Positive (population size is increasing)
• Zero (population size is not changing)
• Negative (population size is declining)