1.5 Completed fertility by motherhood entry age

Completed fertility by motherhood entry age measures the average number of births per woman at the end of her reproductive years, comparing those who started childbearing in adolescence with those who started after adolescence. In West Africa, women who begin childbearing in adolescence consistently had much higher fertility than those who begin after adolescence, no matter the trends in overall fertility. Given that this measure can be difficult for a lay audience to understand, this analysis aims to verify whether this difference is found in other world regions, in order to describe the findings in the text rather than convey them in figures. Nevertheless, the analysis will produce the measure, alongside one other that may be simpler for the general public to understand. That is, a measure of the average number of additional births to adolescent starters compared to non-adolescent starters (rather than showing total births to both groups). This comparison will only be possible for cohorts of women 40 years and older at the time of a DHS or MICS survey, but will produce country-specific, regional and global trends.