The uniqueness of the Ethiopian demographic transition within sub-Saharan Africa: multiple responses to population pressure, and preconditions for rural fertility decline and capturing the demographic dividend

The findings of our new book on population and development in the second largest country, Ethiopia, are presented. We highlight its uniqueness in demographic transitions among countries in sub-Saharan African. Ethiopia has the largest rural-urban fertility gap (with below replacement fertility for Addis Ababa), the lowest maternal health service coverage by far, the highest percentage of illiterate mothers, the largest number of food insecure people, and 83% of the population concentrated mainly in densely populated rural areas. We present a new framework for the study of both poverty and development-driven causes and demographic responses to frequent hazards common in the fragile Horn of Africa. Multiple vulnerabilities and responses are rigorously documented, with migration and off-farm labor mobility, female education, delayed marriage, and lower family size norms predisposing a predicted acceleration of the rural fertility decline. We propose numerous policy and research implications to evaluate progress on what may now be reachable 2015 population policy targets in TFR and CPR, and to prepare for a potential demographic dividend.

The uniqueness of the Ethiopian demographic transition within sub-Saharan Africa: multiple responses to population pressure, and preconditions for rural fertility decline and capturing the demographic dividend

Introduction
This article is a summary based on a new book published by Springer Press (Teller and Assefa, 2011a), with some very new data.The book was written in response to the need for an academic publication on population and develophttp://aps.journals.ac.za ment in Ethiopia, in particular, and sub-Saharan Africa in general.We expect the book can help meet the needs of the rapidly growing number of universities in Africa and as a reliable research and evidence-based reference for government and for international and indigenous development partners.The realworld challenge has been to adapt the general Western demographic transition theory and frameworks to meet our local and pressing African needs and to understand our different emerging realities.
There has been little consensus on the timing, pace and causality related to poverty and socio-economic development in sub-Saharan Africa.In this heterogeneous region, the demographic transition theory has not been very predictive of the variations between countries.Moreover, especially for the volatile Horn of Africa, it does not take into account the realities of multiple risks and on-going vulnerabilities and hazards in addressing poverty, climate change, instability, excess mortality, food insecurity and globalization.For policy purpose, it is important that population dynamics be well integrated into poverty reduction, climate adaptation and growth and transformation programs and strategies.

Literature and conceptual framework
The book begins with a chapter introducing a more contextual conceptual framework (Figure 1) that balances the population-development structural determinants with the demographic responses to vulnerability and frequent hazards.In this way it proposes to be more policy-relevant for high priority national goals, such as poverty reduction, food insecurity mitigation, disaster risk reduction, and the health and education MDGs in demographically challenged sub-Saharan African countries, including Ethiopia.
The framework follows the respected international socio-demographic traditions, including Amos Hawley's (1950) Human Ecology, Kingsley Davis' (1963) Theory of the Multiphasic Change and Response and Boserup's (1965) Agricultural Transformation.It includes appropriate adaptation to the African context, including Adepoju's classic (1994) "Rethinking the Approaches to the Study of Population Dynamics in Africa", as well as advances in the fertility transition by Caldwell (1982), mortality (Hill, 1999) and in migration by Oucho (1990) and Adepoju (1996).It redresses the marginalization of importance of migration, urbanization and mobility, as shown in the Bilsborrow-Carr (2001) application to agriculture and rural development, and the De Sherbinin et al. (2007), Tacoli (2007) and Adamo (2009) focus on micro demographic dynamics of the household and social ecology.
We discuss both the similarities and differences in demographic structure, dynamics and composition between Ethiopia and the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, as well as within Ethiopia.Ethiopia is unique also because of its rich and varied cultural background which continues to thrive today.Thus it follows the increased interest in non-socio-economic aspects, such as cultural, diffusional, generational (eg.transitions to adulthood) and ideational approaches, as seen in Lesthaeghe (2010), Lloyd et al. (2005) and the more recent writings http://aps.journals.ac.za of Joel Cohen (2008).It strives to be both holistic and multi-disciplinary, and focuses more on the demographic responses to development, with adaptation and change in the face of chronic hazards, shocks and instability.These responses then feed back into the population structure of the country which interact with other development processes in a continuous iterative process.
In Ethiopia, a policy-relevant, evidencebased research to action approach has been, since the early 1990s, addressing several main demographic pressure and social change dynamics within the broader poverty, food insecurity and development context, as well as the specific National Population Policy. http://aps.journals.ac.za These include population research related to our conceptual framework by Dessalegn (1992;2009), Assefa (1994;;2006), Markos (1997), Dejene (1997), Lindstrom andBetamariam (1999), Markos andGebre-Egziabher (2000), Hogan and Betamariam (2003), Eshetu andGoldstein (2000), andTeller et al. (2005), among others.They have had some influence in informing policies related to population and development, but often have not been widely disseminated nor easily accessed in the country.
Our book (Teller and Assefa, 2011a) is divided into the five thematic areas, based on the highest policy priority area in the population and development policy of Ethiopia, namely: 1. Center-DTRC), demographic/ health and surveillance systems and social science and health research, both national or regionally representative, as well as in-depth case studies, regional and district vulnerability profiles and graduate student theses (qualitative and quantitative).
Additional vital local area information comes from routine service statistics and planning and evaluation departments of sectoral ministries, especially the Federal and Regional Ministries of Health (MoH), Education (MoE) and Finance and Economic Development (MoFED).International partners, in collaboration with the gov-ernment and NGOs, are also very important in supporting demographic data collection and especially their analysis in Ethiopia (eg. the World Bank, UNICEF, USAID, UNFPA, Population Council, Packard Foundation, and the Population Reference Bureau).
The various methods to analyze these data include a combination of quantitative, qualitative and mixed approaches.In order to analyze the trends, longitudinal and repeated questions on national censuses, national and sub-national surveys and local surveillance systems are used.To understand the causes and consequences over time, multilevel and multivariate techniques are used, along with in-depth case studies and contextual qualitative research.Many of the methods are comparative, analyzing disparities and differences both between countries and within Ethiopia.For policy and program purposes, the identification of vulnerable populations and target groups are done through use of demographic, socio-economic, anthropological, political-historical, agro-ecological and spatial techniques.

Why the Ethiopian Demographic
Transition is unique within sub-Saharan Africa: .3);and the rural, with 83% of the population, is in its incipient stage, with a slight decline, but still with a TFR above 6 in 2005 (see rural-urban gap in Figure 3).

Revised theory of the multiple causes of the fertility transition:
There is a balance between poverty and vulnerability, with human and economic development and cultural diffusion, as main drivers of the incipient fertility transition; moreover, some of the uniqueness of rural Ethiopia, have been demographic responses to food insecurity, drought, instability and other hazards and shocks, including: • Population pressure, land frag-mentation, and landlessness.• Urban youth unemployment, highest among females 20-29.• Increased off-farm, but non-diversified, labor migration.These negative factors, along with important positive factors including higher school enrolment, greater youth aspirations, basic rural health services and women's empowerment, as well as new 2005 Family Law raising the legal age of marriage to 18 years, are serving to delay marriage and lower desired Figure 3 The growing rural-urban fertility divide : total fertility by residence, in Ethiopia, 1990-2005. Sources: CSA, 1991and 1999;and CSA and ORC Macro, 2001  family size, including the proximate determinants of abortion and contraceptive use.2Socio-cultural change is also occurring among the younger generations in the small towns and villages in much of Ethiopia.Community norms of family formation are related to later age at marriage and lower fertility expectations among youth.The increasing cost of living and raising a family are reinforcing rising individual aspirations and expectations of a merit-based society.This, along with the expansion of primary education, a slight improvement in secondary enrolment, increased communication and urban diffusion, mobile phone use, mass communications and geographic mobility all affect lifetime goals.Thus, the value of children, of early marriage and of kinship ties is weakening.

Expected acceleration in the pace of the fertility decline in
Ethiopia: preconditions include • Rising CPR among young married couples (compared with rest of sub-Saharan Africa, Table 1).• Reductions in desired family size and in additional children (compare with rest of sub-Saharan Africa, Table 2).• Rising age at marriage (Figure 4), youth aspirations and related socio-cultural change.• Steep declines in under-five mortality (the child survival hypothesis) (Figure 5).• Increase in girls' (primary completion rate and absorption into secondary schools) staying in school and lengthening transitions from youth into adulthood and marriage.
• Increasing temporary migration, off-farm employment and urban contact and diffusion.• Strengthening the rural-urban linkages as well as improving the rural non-farm and rural agricultural linkages to absorb the rural labor in employment.

The demographic dividend:
While age dependency has not declined since 1994, with the predicted acceleration in the fertility decline, the predicted youth bulge and lowering age dependency will provide an increasing proportion of the population in the working age category.If the above preconditions are met, the future is promising and the youth would turn out to be a "grown up" dividend rather than "giving up" burden.The preconditions for reaping the potential dividend are assessed to be: skillful youth jobs; agricultural intensification and modernization; technological adaptation; labor intensive production technology; educational quality and efficiency; educational efficiency; healthier lifestyles; higher youth aspirations; better governance; and higher quality of institutions (Yordanos et al. 2011).

4.6
Elongation of the youth transition to adulthood: Increased higher education and youth aspirations in urban and accessible rural areas suggest that these youth may be on the vanguard of social change, with implications for delayed marriage and childbearing.A critique of classical economic theories of the demographic transition reveals that they did not take into account the diffusion of ideas, modern communications, and technologies that lead to a more merit-based paths to individual capabilities, lifetime goals, i.e., ("agency") and social mobil-ity (see Herman et al. 2011)

IMR U5MR
Sources: CSA, 1991CSA, , 1993;;and CSA and ORC Macro, 2001  vised, along with a rational human resource promotion plan, which would help prevent high turnover.10.Reduce demographic inequities with vulnerable populations that have been based on rural-urban, pastoral-agricultural, social class, gender, ethnicity and region.Population redistribution policies can help reduce the huge rural-urban and unskilled-skilled labor gaps.11.Enhance the effectiveness of the recent rapid update of contraceptive injectables with longer-term methods for younger couples.12. Improve women's access to secondary education and decision-making autonomy: Enabling women and girls to have the autonomy to make informed choices regarding their sexual lives, age at marriage and timing of pregnancy, which may assist the effort in accelerating the rate of decline of MMR.These are underlying causes of socio-economic and health problems in Ethiopia.In conclusion, we are calling for more collaboration and communication between those in academia, research and data generation professions, and policymakers, practitioners and media, as well as technical harmonization of conflicting demographic data.Our analysis should be more locally motivated and contextually driven, and guided by more relevant home-grown theories and models.A good example presently is the large gap in academic research and rigorous evaluation on the explicit link between population and adaptation to climate variability in the Horn of Africa.Our hope is that the enormous potential of this culturally diverse and geo-politically and huge strategic region can reap the potential of the demographic dividend for our children and grandchildren to come.We hope that this research is one small step in this direction. and

Figure 2
Figure 2 Five different stages of the fertility transition, countries with multiple DHS, 1990-2008 aps.journals.ac.za

Figure 4
Figure 4Rise in age at marriage in younger cohorts: age specific trends in median age at first marriage inEthiopia, 1990Ethiopia,  -2005

Table 1
Percentage of currently married women aged 15-49 using any modern contraceptive method by residence and education, eastern and southern Africa countries with three successive DHS surveys:ca.1990-ca.2005

Table 2
Percentage of currently married women who want no more children, by residence and parity 15-49, eastern and southern African countries with three successiveDHS surveys,ca.1990DHSsurveys,ca.-ca.2005 Source: various DHS surveys; calculated from data http://aps.journals.ac.za Development in Africa: The Unique Case of Ethiopia.Edited by C. Teller and Assefa Hailemariam.Dordretch: Springer.World Bank.(2007).Ethiopia: Capturing http://aps.journals.ac.za