Spatial variability in fertility in Menoufia, Egypt, assessed through the application of remote-sensing and GIS technologies

Fertility in rural areas such as the Governorate of Menoufia in Egypt may be influenced both by spatial factors (including the diffusion of innovations) and by essentially nonspatial factors (such as the availability of education for women and the percentage of adult women who are currently married). The nonspatial variables are available directly from censuses but the spatial component requires an accurate location of the villages to which the census data refer and then appropriate decomposition of the data into spatial and nonspatial components. We use IRS satellite imagery to classify the built area in a rural governorate in Egypt and then assign village-level census data to the centroids of those polygons and incorporate the data into a GIS. We then employ measures of global and local spatial statistics to conclude that in 1976 the combination of female illiteracy, proportion married, and spatial clustering accounted for 39% of the variation in fertility in Menoufia. In 1986 those same factors explained 51% of the variation in fertility. In 1976 about one third and in 1986 about half of the explained variability was due to the spatial component ('diffusion') and the other half due to a combination of demographic characteristics. Furthermore, between 1976 and 1986 there was a clear north-to-south drift of fertility, with lower fertility being clustered in the north and higher fertility clustered in the south.