FERTILITY RATE AND HIV/AIDS NEXUS IN NIGERIA ‘A CASE STUDY OF NORTH CENTRAL ZONE OF NIGERIA.

This paper examines the relationship between HIV/AIDS and fertility growth in North Centre zone (NCz) of Nigeria. The NCZ has the highest HIV/AIDS prevalence cases from the six Geo-political zones in Nigeria. The focus states in NCZ include: Benue, Niger, Nasarawa and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT). These four states have the highest HIV/AIDS prevalence rate in NCZ as revealed by National Bureau of Statistics (2009).The demographic transition theory by Thompson .W. (1929) and Traits-Desires-Intentions-Behavior (TDIB) framework developed by Miller (1994) were adopted as the theoretical framework and the empirical analysis was carried out using primary data of 200 women that are seropositive and 200 women that are not. The preliminary result shows that some seropositive women tend to have more children as a result of antiretroviral drugs and new developed drugs that reduce the risks of mother to child transmission. Also, other seropositive women tend to reduce the numbers of Children they desire to have as a result of high cost of health care and fear of short life expectancy. For the non- infected women, the result shows that fertility rate is declining. Currently, the relationship between HIV/AIDS and fertility growth is inconclusive in Nigeria.