Amid worries about kidnapped girls, Nigeria’s traditions are unkind, too
Sex-selective abortions are used round the world to discriminate in favour of boys. But not in Africa. Nigeria’s sex ratio at birth is the natural one: 106 boys are born for every 100 girls (boys are more vulnerable to infant diseases, so this ratio ensures that equal numbers of the sexes reach puberty). By contrast, at its worst, China had 120 boys for every 100 girls. Moreover, in Nigeria, there are plenty of both: the fertility rate is 6.0, meaning the average woman can expect to have six children, or three sons. Parents have no need of extra measures to ensure boys are born.
Yet despite all this, a recent study* finds that Nigeria also suffers from sexual bias from birth and that, while this does not skew the sex ratio, it manifests itself in other ways that harm individuals and society as a whole. Son-preference damages maternal health, makes marriage trickier for women, increases polygamy and alters the institution of child-fostering, which is widespread in West Africa.
In Nigeria, as in many other African countries, only men may own family land. This gives everyone an economic need for sons, including women, who face a grim widowhood without one. The need for sons changes fertility patterns. According to the latest demographic and health survey (financed by the American government), women whose first child is a daughter are likely to have more children than those whose first child is a son. They are less likely to use contraceptives. And, if their first three children are daughters, they are very likely to have a fourth very quickly (within 15 months). The differences are small but consistent: having a daughter first changes child-bearing choices later.
Still the desirable sex
It also changes a woman’s married life. Women with first-born daughters are 1.2 percentage points more likely to end up in a polygamous union. Some husbands, it turns out, take another wife if their first child is a girl (polygamy is legal in northern Nigeria and recognised by customary law elsewhere). Men also seem more willing to abandon or divorce wives who produce a daughter. Among women aged 30 to 49, those with first-born girls are more likely to be divorced, have a non-resident husband or be the head of a household.
Heading a household may sound like a good thing. But in Nigeria, as in most countries, female headship is associated with poverty. In fact, almost everything to do with having a daughter first is bad for women. Being in a polygamous household harms their health and their children’s because of competition for food in the home. Having children in quick succession damages maternal health, since mothers need time to recover after giving birth. The need to produce sons may also help explain Nigeria’s maternal-mortality rate of 550 deaths per 100,000 live births—one of the highest rates in the world, even though Nigeria is now a middle-income country.
The preference for sons is so profound that it even affects a practice which may seem to have little to do with it: fostering. Almost a fifth of families in Nigeria send a child away to be brought up in another household, often that of a cousin or distant family member. Households with several boys foster girls to help with the chores. But households with girls do not foster boys: they keep on trying to have a son of their own. The sense that nieces may be substitute daughters but nephews cannot be substitute sons shows how entrenched son-preference is.
* ‘Son preference, fertility and family structure’ by Annamaria Milazzo, World Bank Working Paper 6869
• Culled from The Economist
