The average birth per Kenya women has become the lowest at 3.9 this year in East Africa, compared to that of its counterparts in Burundi and Uganda, the East African reports.
According to World Population Data prepared by UN-based Population Reference Bureau(PRB), the data of Kenya is lower than the Africa’s fertility rate which is at 4.6 but higher than the global average 2.5.
According to the data of Population Reference Bureau, Burundi is at the top of the East African list with 5.5, almost six children per woman, followed by Uganda (5.4), Tanzania (5.2), Ethiopia (4.6), Rwanda (4.2) and Kenya (3.9).
Kenya’s fertility rate has declined from 8.1 in 1978 to 3.9 currently in the last four decades. Higher education and sense of career-first of Kenyan women had driven the fertility number down.
As global policy institutes like United Nations encouraged, the smaller the family size is, the better the allocation of family resources as a socio-economic tool become.
“Due to high fertility rates in previous decades, there are many more families in Kenya today and so even though families are smaller, the total number of children continues to grow,” Former World Bank’s lead economist for Kenya, Wolfgang Fengler says in the report.
“This means the working-age population segment will grow much faster than that of the young and elderly population group, reducing dependency,” he added.
Meanwhile, the lower birth rate of Kenya is considered to cause the shortage of youth workforce which would influence the development of the economic in the future.
But even as the size of the Kenyan family shrinks, the population is projected to nearly double in the next three decades to 96 million in 2050 from the current 49 million.
