Abstract

Fertility is one of the most important components of population growth, and its development and level vary from one society to another. Fertility, as is known, adds numbers to the population starting from age zero, and then this effect continues on the population year after year. If the birth rate suddenly decreases, when these newborns grow up, there will still be fewer of them in the age group they reach, but if the fertility rate rises, there will be more in each younger age group, and both cases greatly affect the age/gender structure.
Data shows the trend of total fertility rate in Egypt during the last three decades. Total fertility rate dropped from a high level of 5.3 children in 1980 to reach 3.5 births per women in 2000, such a decline of 1.8 births in 20 years. The rate continued to decrease with slower pace to reach 3.1 in 2005, however, the result of EDHS 2008 has shown no further considerable fertility decline as TFR three children, the final results of the Egyptian Family Health Survey 2021, the preliminary results of which were announced in August 2022, showed that the total birth rate for previously married women in the age group (15-49 years) reached 2.85 children per woman in 2021 compared to 3.5 children per woman of the year 2014.
The Unmet need for family planning Is percentage of women who are fecund and sexually active, who wish to stop or delay childbearing, but who are not using any form of contraception. A woman is also considered to have an unmet need if she was pregnant at the time of data collection, but reported that the pregnancy was unwanted or mistimed, or if a woman was postpartum amenorrhea, not using family planning and her most recent birth was unwanted or mistimed, This indicator measures, at the population level, the gap between women’s.
One of the important programmatic questions in family planning is how to satisfy the unmet need of family planning particularly when it stands at high levels, in order to achieve the policy goals of fertility decline. The levels of unmet need for family planning in the late 1980s and early 1990s were approaching 28 percent, which means that more than one fourth of currently married women were not using any method of contraception while they wanted to space or terminate their childbearing. The recent data from EDHS 2008 indicate that the level of unmet need for family planning has decline considerably to about 9 percent and increase to reach 12.6 in 2014 & 2021.
In this context, the present study focuses mainly on examining recent trends of fertility decline in order to through some light on the extent to which the targeted population is moving to the achievement of replacement level as a policy goal. The study attempts to understand fertility transition towards Small family size or replacement level in Egypt, more specifically.