Within the broad agenda of economic development, we suggest a model of leadership production and selection which shows how the optimal number of people required to bridge the gap between actual and potential economic performance could be raised and selected into public office. The honesty and...

Africa continues to face serious development challenges despite recent record growth rates. Such challenges as dependency, corruption, underdeveloped infrastructure and production sectors, and leadership and governance are some of the impediments to Africa¡¯s quest for sustainable and...

We explore the spatial distribution of orphans in two areas of Malawi. We first review pertinent themes in qualitative data collected in our research sites. Then, using spatial analysis, we show how positive and negative clusters of orphans—which we term orphanhood "hotspots" and...

A positive relationship between the number of siblings and a child’s chance of being stunted has been seen in several studies. It is possible that individual stunting risks are also raised by high fertility in the community, partly because of the impact of aggregate fertility on the local...

Knowledge dissemination is an emerging issue in population studies, both in terms of ethics and data quality. The challenge is especially important in long term follow-up surveys and it requires methodological imagination when the population is illiterate. The paper presents the dissemination...

Using results from the ethnographic literature and two qualitative studies on people’s representations of different means of birth control (abstinence, contraception, abortion) in two populations in Burkina Faso (one rural and one urban), we designed a multi-dimensional quantitative scale...

This paper investigates the impact of female employment on fertility in two urban contexts in sub-Saharan Africa: Dakar (Senegal) and Lomé (Togo). The hypothesis that wage employment and maternal obligations are incompatible seems to be corroborated in Lomé, where women are likely to consider...

This paper evaluates fertility and migration theory in order to further understand the impact of migration on fertility. I first analyze the fertility and migration literature separately and then look at the burgeoning literature on the impact of migration on fertility. As a result, I propose an...

The demographic study of nuptiality in African countries is not very developed and often of secondary interest in a discussion of the proximate determinants of fertility. This paper uses unusual marriage history data to examine divorce and remarriage in rural Malawi. Life table probabilities of...