Fertility transitions are historically thought to have started in cities and then spread to the rest of the country. This would suggest that in Egypt we would find that Cairo was well ahead of the rest of the nation in its fertility transition. The data suggest otherwise and highlight the fact that many parts of Cairo are still experiencing high levels of fertility. Population geographers have generally examined differences only between urban and nonurban areas, but incorporating census tract level data from the 1996 and 1986 censuses of Egypt into a geographic information system, we are able to show that there are substantial intraurban geographic variations in fertility within the greater Cairo area. These spatial patterns are indicative of underlying clusters of differences in human reproduction that have important implications for understanding the decline of fertility within Cairo and the spread of that decline throughout the remainder of Egypt.
Fertility in rural areas such as the Governorate of Menoufia in Egypt may be influenced both by spatial factors (including the diffusion of innovations) and by essentially nonspatial factors (such as the availability of education for women and the percentage of adult women who are currently married). The nonspatial variables are available directly from censuses but the spatial component requires an accurate location of the villages to which the census data refer and then appropriate decomposition of the data into spatial and nonspatial components. We use IRS satellite imagery to classify the built area in a rural governorate in Egypt and then assign village-level census data to the centroids of those polygons and incorporate the data into a GIS. We then employ measures of global and local spatial statistics to conclude that in 1976 the combination of female illiteracy, proportion married, and spatial clustering accounted for 39% of the variation in fertility in Menoufia. In 1986 those same factors explained 51% of the variation in fertility. In 1976 about one third and in 1986 about half of the explained variability was due to the spatial component (‘diffusion’) and the other half due to a combination of demographic characteristics. Furthermore, between 1976 and 1986 there was a clear north-to-south drift of fertility, with lower fertility being clustered in the north and higher fertility clustered in the south.
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