Abstract:
This study predicted the impact of women's empowerment on fertility preferences in Rwanda. The study predicted the fertility preference as a function of women empowerment indicators namely family empowerment, economic empowerment, and socio-demographic characteristics. The study used secondary data from the 2019-2020 Rwanda Demographic and Health Survey (RDHS), which surveyed 14,634 women aged 15-49 years. The study utilized multivariate logistic regression analysis to identify the women's empowerment indicators that had a significant correlation with fertility preferences among women in Rwanda.
The study utilized five classification algorithms for machine learning, namely logistic regression, decision tree, random forest, support vector machine, and K-nearest neighbor, to develop a predictive model. In addition, six evaluation metrics, which include accuracy, precision, recall, F1 score, confusion matrix, and area under the receiver operating characteristics curve ROC-AUC, were employed to evaluate the performance of each model.
The findings revealed that more empowered women express a significantly lower desire for more children compared to less empowered ones. The study identified that having active participation in household decision-making is a key indicator of women's empowerment, and it was found to be associated with a greater likelihood of desiring fewer children among married women in Rwanda.
The results exhibited the robustness of the logistic regression model in predicting fertility
preference in Rwanda, among other models, with an accuracy of 79.44%, precision of 79.81%, recall of 79.34%, AUROC of 79.44%, and F1 score of 79.58%.
To sum up, the study findings suggest that promoting women's empowerment is crucial for
decreasing the number of children per woman. Enhancing education, developing skills, granting decision-making authority, ensuring access on employment opportunities, and providing control over household resources were identified as key elements of women's empowerment that influence their fertility preferences. Moreover, the study revealed that in Rwanda, family and economic empowerment hold significant importance in enabling women to achieve their desired number of children.
