Men are Missing from African Family Planning

Family planning programs in sub-Saharan Africa haven’t succeeded in reducing population growth as elsewhere in the world. The authors argue this is because a central driver of high fertility has been consistently disregarded: men, who have significant control over childbearing in Africa. The marriage process itself, in which men give gifts and money to the families of their future wives through bridewealth payments, fundamentally shapes gender norms and determines power relations between men and women.

online resources

future projections

Interested in what the populations of some of the countries mentioned in Frost and Dodoo’s article are projected to be in 40 years? Then check out these population pyramids from the census bureau for Ghana, and Kenya.

the population boom around the world

The population boom in developing nations is not just restricted to the African continent. According to the 2008 World Population Data Sheet, nearly all of the world’s population growth is now concentrated in the poorest countries.

the u.n. and unesco

Check out the websites for the U.N. Millennium Development Goals and UNESCO’s Education for All programs mentioned in this article.