Plateauing of the Bangladesh Fertility Decline

 Funded by: USAID

Bangladesh has supported a very effective national family planning program which reduced the average number of children for each married couple from around seven in the past, to a little more than three children by the early 1990s.  The country was well on the way to achieving replacement fertility by the target year of 2005. However, over the past decade, the fertility decline has stalled or plateaued at one child above replacement level, and it is no longer clear when the target of replacement fertility will be reached.

This study has looked intensively into all available sources of data to try to understand the reasons for the stalling of fertility, and to attempt to predict when fertility will again fall, and to what level.

The findings so far indicate that the very rapid fertility decline of the 1980s was genuinely due to widespread uptake of modern contraceptive methods, but also partly a consequence of increasing age at childbearing caused by adoption of family planning methods, particularly after the first born child  the so-called tempo or timing effect.

The findings of our in-depth interviews with many rural couples indicate there is still a tendency to want three children, a mix of boys and girls, as concerns remain about the survival of children to adulthood.  While son preference has been declining, it still persists to a sufficient extent to have an impact on overall fertility, namely wanting three rather than two children.

While further efforts to reduce fertility may focus on improving the quality of family planning services to reduce drop-outs, any major reduction in future will require social changes which bring about delays in both age at marriage for women, and average age of first birth.  The latter effect requires adoption of contraception by newly married couples.

So, future programs and policies to reduce fertility will have to rely increasingly on the provision for young women of alternative roles to early marriage and childbearing.  Such social changes will inevitably revolve around greater encouragement to complete secondary and higher schooling, and an expanded range of employment options.  Improved child survival can be expected to have a positive impact on lowering fertility also.