SA women having fewer babies

South Africa's population hit 50-million this year, but the country's population growth is considerably slower than that of Africa's 39 high-fertility countries. Experts have emphasised that South Africa's relatively low population growth was less the result of a higher death rate caused by the HIV/AIDS pandemic than a consequence of women having fewer children. In a week in which the United Nations announced that the world's seven-billionth human being had been born, in the Philippines, Africa's gathering population explosion also came under the spotlight.

Eleven countries in the world have fertility rates of more than six babies per woman and nine of those countries are in Africa. Sub-Saharan Africa's population stood at about 100-million in 1900 and 750-million in 2005. The latest UN projections suggested it would level off at more than two billion after 2050. The latest figures from Statistics South Africa's 2011 mid-year population survey show that South Africa is growing at a rate of 1.1% a year.

Rob Dorrington, director of the Centre for Actuarial Research at the University of Cape Town, said that women's fertility rates in the country had declined steadily since the 1980s.  Old Mutual actuary risk product manager Ferdi Booysen said that lower birth rates could be ascribed to gender equality and the fact that more women were working. He said that people were also getting married later and having kids at more advanced ages than before, which reduced the reproductive lifespan of women. Costs of education and living also contributed to smaller families.

Booysen said that the falling birth rate put additional pressure on the working population, as there were fewer taxpayers to support a burgeoning population of retired people and their healthcare costs. Stellenbosch economics professor Servaas van der Berg, however, said that this had not yet happened in South Africa because life expectancy - at 54.9 years for males and 59.1 years for females - was relatively low. He said the strong downward trend in the number of South African children being born had implications for the way in which the government used its resources.

The inference was that the authorities could now shift funding from such activities as the provision of new schools. The average length of life in South Africa dropped by about 10 years between the 1990s and 2005 because of AIDS deaths, said Dorrington. About a million babies were born each year in the country, whereas about 600 000 people died. Dorrington said that an important counterbalancing factor was the rollout of HIV/AIDS treatment - of the roughly five-million South Africans living with HIV/AIDS about a million were now receiving antiretrovirals.

As a result average life expectancy was now increasing. Van der Berg said the country currently stood in an intermediate position between the ageing populations of the developed world and the high birth and death rates of developing countries. But what concerned him was that South Africa's infant mortality rates were much higher than they should be at the country's stage of development. According to the Stats SA mid-year report from 2011, 37.9 of every 1 000 children born died before they reached the age of one, and 54.3 died before they turned five.

Clifford Odimegwu, head of Wits University's programme in demography and population studies, said South Africa could also expect a growing number of refugees to cross its borders, because overcrowding led to economic migration. Odimegwu also warned against over dramatising the risks of overpopulation, saying that it was almost impossible to stop humans procreating. With growing populations, people had to live more intelligently, he said, while governments would come under increasing pressure to educate their citizens and use resources more wisely. Odimegwu said one of the biggest problems in South Africa was that the working population that supported children and the aged remained unskilled.

Katharine Child:
The Mail & Guardian, 4 November 2011