Childbearing and labor force participation among young women in rural Malawi

Unlike in more developed regions where increased female labor force participation has in part been driven by a reduction in fertility, sub-Saharan Africa displays a positive cross-national correlation between fertility and female labor force participation. This paper tests the relationship between childbearing and work at the individual level among young women in rural Malawi. Using longitudinal data from the Malawi Schooling and Adolescent Study, we investigate whether (i) having a child influences the probability of paid and unpaid work, (ii) the effects of childbearing on work differ by parity, (iii) increasing spacing between births affects the probability of working, and (iv) the effects of limiting and spacing fertility on work vary by marital status. Descriptive results show that although a majority of women performed non-household work in the past year, only a small minority receive remuneration. Higher parity is indeed associated with higher rates of paid work. However, parsing out women’s labor market activity by marital status reveals that young unmarried women with no children had the highest rate of paid work of any other group. This paper contributes to the literature on whether enabling women to postpone transitions into marriage and motherhood facilitates greater participation in remunerative work.