| Abstract: | Data on educated urban women in Nigeria demonstrate the effect women's education and urbanization has on reproductive behavior, marriage, family formation, and family relationships. Available health services contribute to a fall in infant mortality, but most services are in urban areas. Further, people of high socioeconomic status who have access to modern health services are more concerned about public health problems than those in the low group. Urbanization occurs at a rate of about 11%/year. In Lagos, people with primary education delay marriage 1-2 years longer than those who have no education. Further, 71% of uneducated people in Ibadan who were = or + 38 years old were in a polygynous marriage compared to 38% of educated people in the same age group. The actual and desired family size in Nigeria ranks amoung the highest in the world. In addition, only 20% of the total population use modern contraceptives and usage is highest in Lagos and Ibadan. Most acceptors are educated urban middle class who use contraceptives to space births instead of the traditional spacing methods of postpartum abstinence and prolonged lactation. Eventually more and more urban middle class women will use contraceptives to prevent births. 1% of these acceptors are demographic innovators, however. Further they begin to use contraceptives at high parities. Still child mortality among them is lower than others. Since the late 1970s, as people are being exposed to Western culture, the economy has improved, mortality has fallen, more children attend schools, yet fertility has grown substantially in urban and rural areas. With the expansion of Western education to females, the changing pattern of life style of the educated urban middle class, and increase of women in nontraditional professions, expectations and needs of children will change. Around 2000 Nigeria will begin its demographic transition from high to low fertility. |
