Rural Commercialization and Contraceptive Use in Ghana

Kofi D. Benefo, City University of New York

The paper will examine the role of rural commercialization in fertility transition by looking at the relationships between household and community level participation in market production and contraceptive use in rural Ghana. It will also examine some of reasons why commercialization is linked to fertility and some socio-economic factors that condition the relationship. The paper focuses on commercialization because traditional demographic transition theory sees it as a key precondition for fertility decline while research in family sociology has indicated that commercialization is one of the most powerful forces shaping families, kinship and gender relations in rural societies. The paper will use data from the Ghana Living Standards Measurement Survey conducted in the late 1980s and early 1990s and the 1984 Ghana Population census.