This award supports a cultural anthropologist studying fertility, mortality and wealth flows among peasant farmers in Kenya. The research will test the theory of wealth flows, that fertility changes in response to the wealth parents expect to have under varying regimes of education, employment, and family responsibilities. This research extends a year-long prior study of a neighboring community, and will provide comparative information to test the implications of the theory. This study is important because population growth is one of the major problems facing third-world countries such as Kenya. Unless planners can come to grips with the basic causes of declining fertility, economic development and security are precarious. Improved understanding of the causes of variation in fertility will help produce programs of fertility control, which can ameliorate some of the development problems.
