Content area
Full text
Roukaya Hamani has an in-law problem. Her husband’s parents want more grandbabies, but she doesn’t want any more children right now. She’s already given birth four times; one of the babies died, and so now she has three, ages seven, five, and 16 months. She’s 18 years old.
“I just pray to God to bless those three babies I have,” she says. The local health centre in her village of Darey Maliki offered her free contraception, which they get partly from the NGO Pathfinder, but Hamani declined. “Maybe [my in-laws] would tell my husband to marry another woman to have more babies,” she says. “If they want me to have another pregnancy, I can do it just for them to feel happy.”
Hamani, a smiley, gap-toothed girl in a long orangey-brown headscarf worn in the popular style here – tight around her face and then flowing down to the knee, over a bright printed dress – never went to school, and got married when she was 10 and her husband was 20. He works in the fields and she keeps the home, waking up at dawn every day. “Why don’t I want to have another?” she says. “Because being a mother is not easy work.”
Hamani’s life is in many ways illustrative for women in rural Niger, where she lives in a small village of mud-brick houses lining sand-dust roads. Girls here get married young, usually as teenagers, and have their first child at 18. Polygamy is legal and commonplace, especially in the rural areas where about 80% of the population resides. More than half of girls don’t complete primary school, and fewer than one in 10 attend secondary school – as a result, less than a quarter of women here are literate. Women have an average of more than seven children apiece, the highest in the world. And they face a one-in-23 chance of dying from pregnancy or childbirth.
But Hamani is unusual in that three babies are enough for her. Despite having the highest fertility rate in the world, women and men alike in Niger say they want more children than they actually have – women want an average of nine, while men say they want 11.
When you have a huge number...