THE ROLE OF FEMALE EDUCATION
Chapter 10. Stabilizing Population by Reducing Fertility
Lester R. Brown, Eco-Economy: Building an Economy for the Earth
(W.W. Norton & Co., NY: 2001).
Over the last two decades, scores of studies
have analyzed the relationship between female education and fertility
and have concluded that the more education women have, the fewer
children they bear. A 1999 survey of research by the U.S. National
Academy of Sciences (NAS) analyzes studies that compare countries
with varying levels of female education and studies that examine
changing levels of female education in individual countries over
time. Both groups of studies support this basic hypothesis.36
The NAS study contrasts Sri Lanka and Pakistan, for example. Sri
Lanka, which has a female literacy level of 87 percent for women
over age 15, has a total fertility rate of just over two children
per woman. In Pakistan, where only 24 percent of adult women can
read and write, the fertility rate is 5.6 children. Pakistan is
typical of most countries, but there are occasional exceptions.
For example, in Jordan 86 percent of the women are literate, but
the fertility rate is the same as in Pakistan. Bangladesh is also
something of an anomaly, because although only 26 percent of its
women are literate, its fertility rate has dropped by half over
the last generation.37
As the NAS survey notes, the relationship between educational level
and fertility is not always a simple one. For example, while rising
female educational levels lead to smaller family size, so does the
desire to educate children. Once couples decide that they want to
educate their children, including girls, they are faced with the
cost of education. This in itself is apparently reducing family
size.38
In Bangladesh, as noted earlier, the fertility rate was almost cut
in half within 16 years. One factor apparently affecting family
size was spreading land poverty as land was divided and subdivided
from one generation to the next. Among families with relatively
small plots of land to begin with, fragmentation leads to basic
changes in thinking. At one time, economic security came from owning
land. It was always a source of employment and food. But as the
land per family shrinks, this security diminishes, leading many
couples to define economic security for their children, and thus
indirectly for themselves, in the form of a wage-paying job. Getting
such a job requires education. This is costly, leading to a conscious
reduction in family size that is not necessarily dependent on any
gains in income or female literacy.39
Research in Bangladesh shows that thinking about family size is
not occurring in a vacuum. As people are exposed to higher living
standards elsewhere in the world, they begin to think about how
to achieve the same thing for their children. Again, they come back
to education. Investment in education is the key both to a better
life for their children and to their old age security. Large families,
which were an asset when there was more land to farm, have now become
a liability.
While sociologists have looked at the relation between education
and family size, economists have looked at the economics of this
relationship. Lawrence Summers, while Director of Research at the
World Bank, pointed out that at prevailing levels of education,
each additional year of female education reduces fertility by roughly
10 percent. Using this information to analyze the economics of educating
girls, he noted that raising female enrollment in primary school
to the same level as that of males in developing countries would
mean adding some 25 million girls to the current primary school
enrollment. This, he estimated, would cost $938 million per year.
Gender balancing in secondary schools would mean adding 21 million
girls to current enrollment at a cost of roughly $1.4 billion per
year.40
Summers then went on to estimate that this investment of $2.3 billion
would yield a return of 20 percent annually. He noted that it was
the most effective way of breaking the cycle of poverty. As female
education levels rise, women have healthier, better-educated children,
a gain that is typically passed from one generation to the next.
The difficult part is the initial break out of poverty.41
This 20-percent annual return dwarfs that of almost any other investment
in development. For example, the roughly $1 trillion that developing
countries were planning to spend on new power generating facilities
over the next decade would yield an annual return of at most 6 percent,
and sometimes substantially less. Diverting a small amount of investment
from power generation to the education of girls and young women
could both raise families out of poverty and accelerate development.42
ENDNOTES:
37.
Ibid., p. 3.
38. Ibid.
39. Caldwell and Barkat-e-Khuda, op. cit. note 31.
40. Lawrence Summers, "The Most Influential Investment," reprinted
in People and the Planet, vol. 2, no. 1 (1993), p. 10.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid.
Copyright
© 2001 Earth Policy Institute
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