Demography of African Family: Nineteenth to Twenty-First Century

Abstract

The study conducted a review of African family household typologies from the nineteenth century up to the twenty-first century. It also ran a three-decade, multi-country descriptive analysis of trends and patterns of African family households, structures, sizes and their rural-urban distributions between the 1900s and 2011, using census data of ten African countries obtained from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) database. The study highlighted that the extended family and the two-parent family have remained as the predominant family types across all the ten countries. However, there has been a decline in extended families and a gradual increase in two-parent families. Solitary living, couple and single-parent families are on the rise also. The study concludes that African families are diverse, but the diversities and changes over time vary from country to country. This calls for further research on various emerging family types to inform the formulation of policies that encompass all family types and goes beyond the nuclear definition of family, taking into consideration country-specific contextual factors and drivers of change.