# **1 Introduction**

Fertility patterns are central to understanding economic development. Fertility in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is the highest in the world, with an average of 4.6 births per woman in 2020 compared to 2.4 globally (World Bank, 2022b). Across the continent, fertility rates are declining more slowly than in other regions. A common concern among policymakers is that high fertility combined with reductions in infant mortality will increase child dependency ratios, which are associated with poor economic development, low living standards and low educational attainment (African Union, 2017). High fertility rates can also be detrimental for maternal and child health (Mahy, 2003; Stover and Ross, 2010).

This study examines how women’s fertility responds to an increase in their earnings and household wealth. Rather than focusing on multi-pronged interventions that have a range of pathways, we focus on six experimental evaluations of business training and land titling interventions that were exclusively designed to, and succeeded in, increasing women’s income or the value of assets in Benin, Ethiopia, Ghana, Rwanda and Togo (Ali et al., 2015; Campos et al., 2017; Goldstein et al., 2018; Alibhai et al., 2019; Agyei-Holmes et al., 2020; Bakhtiar et al., 2022).<sup>1</sup> Our secondary analysis of these impact evaluations examines the probability of female beneficiaries having a child (and the number of children they have) 12-72 months post-intervention and investigates underlying mechanisms using women’s characteristics at baseline.

We find large positive and statistically significant effects on fertility. Women randomly assigned to receive a business training intervention were 22% more likely to have a child post-treatment in Ethiopia and twice as likely to have a child under five post-treatment in Togo. Within the land titling interventions, we find that women in treatment villages had 5% more children on average two years after demarcation in Benin, while in Ghana, the increase in children among the treatment group was 7.5% one year after demarcation. Moreover, these effects are not statistically different from later effects in second follow-up surveys, indicating that impacts constitute increases in cumulative fertility—or total number of children—and not merely a shortening of birth spacing—or change in timing of children.

Our results are inconsistent with either increases in women’s bargaining power—allowing them to act on their fertility preferences—or with demand for more household labor to farm the newly-titled land driving the fertility effect. We find that fertility increases the most for women in poor households, suggesting that their demand for children may previously have been budget-constrained. However, women’s fertility is unchanged if it is their husband’s income that increases, rather than their own—indicating that our results are not reducible to a simple income effect at the household level. While we have this data only for one setting (Togo), a potential explanation for why women have more children only when their own income increases is that having a child is a form of personal investment to safeguard their long-term economic security. Indeed, we find that women without a son at baseline drive the observed fertility impacts across countries. This effect is even stronger for women whose husbands have sons from other relationships, constituting potential rivals for inheritance. In Ghana, we find the strongest fertility response among women whose husbands belong to an ethnic group in which wives are at greatest risk of dispossession upon their husbands’ 1Importantly, these interventions did not include any content on women’s agency and rights, focusing solely on skills and property rights certification.

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