Early transitions to first sexual intercourse, marriage and childbearing among young-adult women in Kenya: is education delaying its entry?

Sonia Chager, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Throughout the world, the prevalence of adolescent marriages has been relatively declining over the last decades. In Kenya, the age at first marriage has been rising as well as the educational level of its citizens. In this study, early transitions into adulthood among Kenyan women - that is first marriage, sexual intercourse and childbirth - will be explored, taking into account their educational level, as well as the cohort in which they were born. Thus, in this article we aim to examine to what extent educational expansion explains the delay in the age of these transitions, by performing not only a descriptive analysis of these event's patterns, but also a logistic regression in order to predict their probability of occurrence. Given the complexity of the country, other factors will be considered: ethnicity, region, and type of place of residence (urban–rural). The analysis is based on data from the standard Kenyan Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) for the years 1988-89, 1993, 1998, 2003 and 2008-09, focusing on women aged 20-49. The results show a relative decline over time in the proportions of women who have experienced these transitional events at an early age, although the timing for first intercourse takes place rather earlier than for the other two transitional events. Taking into account that it is the urban and educated women who tend to delay more the transitional events into adulthood, especially those with secondary and more studies, in the case of early marriage in Kenya it seems that the change towards its postponement has been mainly due to changes in its population structure (educational structure) for the elder cohorts, followed by some change from the behavioural domain and a certain stability for the younger cohorts.