Women Empowerment and Fertility Management in Nigeria: A Study of Lafia Area of Nasarawa State

Abstract

Women’s empowerment is vital to sustainable development and the realization of human rights for all. Where women’s status is low, family size tends to be large, which makes it more difficult for families to thrive. The ability of women to control their own fertility is absolutely fundamental to women’s empowerment and equality. Hence, this study explores the relationship between women empowerment and their capacity to manage their fertility assuming other factors are held constant. Two hundred women of working age and married were selected in the study area. The selection of the 200 respondents was done using the stratified random sampling technique, to ensure the representativeness of the sample. One hundred and eighty-four (184) copies of the unstructured questionnaire out of the two hundred sent out were returned and treated for the analysis. The co-efficient contingency distribution and the chi-square (X2) techniques were employed. The findings show that the level of women’s education, women’s employment status and women’s level of income, influences them to adopt small family size. The study concludes that fertility management is a very potent tool for women empowerment and vice versa. With advancement towards gender equity and equality and as women’s opportunities for self-actualization expands, their options increase, women will progressively more seek ways of managing their fertility.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n26p9