Trends in Infertility in Cameroon and Nigeria

for which both WFS and DHS data are available, levels of infertility appear to be either declining (in Cameroon, Nigeria and Sudan) or remaining about stable (in Ghana, Kenya and Senegal). The etiology of infertility in Africa is fairly well understood; in the majority of cases, the causes are preventable, such as sexually transmitted diseases and infections following childbirth and abortion.4 Given that health care facilities are limited in Africa, that infertility is difficult and costly to treat, and that resources are scarce, future efforts should therefore focus on preventing infertility.5 More knowledge about trends in infertility is crucial to efforts to evaluate the effectiveness of prevention campaigns, assess levels of infertility, implement new prevention interventions, and better understand and predict levels of fertility and population growth. It is beyond the scope of a single article to analyze the patterns of infertility in all of the countries with available demographic data; the study described in this article was restricted to an examination of the trends in Cameroon and Nigeria. These countries were selected for the following reasons: Cameroon and Nigeria historically shared many cultural and ethnic values, and the establishment of borders between the two countries was fairly arbitrary; at the time of independence, some observers argued that parts Ulla Larsen is an assistant professor in the Department of Population and International Health, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, Mass., USA. This research was supported by grant HD 27610–R01 from the U. S. National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Population Association of America, Miami, Fla., USA, May 5–7, 1994. Trends in Infertility in Cameroon and Nigeria