Sub-Saharan Africa would show greater resistance to fertility decline than any
other region in the world because of a cultural/religious belief system that
sustained and rewarded high fertility. They suggested that there would be ‘no
declines like those of Asia’ (1987:434). The crucial feature of this belief
system, they stated, was the importance attached to the succession of the
generations of a single family, which creates a profound taboo against dying
childless.
Much of West and Central Africa has a household system structured around
a mother and her dependent children. The biological bearing of children and
the cost of child-raising were often separated by a high incidence of child
fostering. This meant that the father was spared the financial cost of rearing
children but he would still receive material benefits from children throughout
his life. This cultural structure, argued Caldwell et al. (1992) meant the usual
economics of the family and fertility did not apply. The practical results were
that contraceptive use in Sub-Saharan African was very low and not likely to
rise,and the ‘inefficiency of African [family planning] programmes is
undoubtedly a matter of lack of individual demand and culturally conditioned
uncertainty of support for them among the leadership’ (Caldwell and Caldwell,
1987:414–5). New findings from Demographic and Health Surveys showed
that birth rates were falling rapidly; by the early 1990s a fertility decline of
ov er 10 per cent had occurred in South-west and possibly also South-east
Nigeria. This latter area was particularly significant because it was where the
Caldwells had observed the social structure that they had argued would inhibit
fertility decline. The mechanism behind the decline in fertility appeared to be
a rapid rise in contraceptive use. In Sub-Saharan Africa female and male
premarital sexual relations are widespread and so carry a considerable risk of
pregnancy followed by the possibility of forced marriage or single mother-
hood. In most parts of the region illiterate girls are not too concerned about the
former and in West Africa there is no social stigma associated with the latter.
Economic growth and the increasing opportunity for women to acquire well-
paid urban jobs have changed this dramatically. Girls increasingly wanted
education because they aspired to urban employment. Economic incentives
had trumped cultural norms.
Whilst economic incentives clearly do often change cultural norms, differ-
ent cultures can react in strikingly different ways to the same set of economic
incentives. An example is that of the two trading groups operating in the
Mediterranean during the late medieval period, the Jewish Maghribi and the
Genoese. Both groups were involved in large-scale, long-distance trade all
over the Mediterranean. The Maghribis had a collectivist culture: mutual
responsibility belonged to all the members of that society and everyone was
expected to respond collectively to whatever transpired between any specific
merchant and agent. Only those agents with a wide reputation for not cheating
were hired by merchants. The Genoese began trading towards the end of the
twelfth century at the same time as Genoa was experiencing rapid immigra-
tion. Over the thirteenth century the population of Genoa increased from
254 Patterns and Determinants of Economic Growth