April 09, 2024 | News

Congratulations Dr. Ben Malinga John

Ben Malinga John sucessfully defended his dissertation on the "Union-Fertility Nexus and Fertility Variation in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Role of Marital Dissolution and Repartnering" at Stockholm University. © private

We are pleased to congratulate Ben Malinga John on the successful defense of his dissertation on the "Union-Fertility Nexus and Fertility Variation in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Role of Marital Dissolution and Repartnering" at Stockholm University.

Ben is team member in our Laboratory of Fertility and Well-Being and was part of the The International Max Planck Research School for Population, Health and Data Science (IMPRS-PHDS), a three-year doctoral program that merges demography, epidemiology and data science. In his doctoral thesis he focused on analyzing the dynamics of marital dissolution and assessing the relationship between union dissolution and fertility in 34 sub-Saharan African countries. The analyses involved using traditional demographic and statistical techniques and developing new indirect demographic methods to understand the levels of all-cause first union dissolution, the timing of first union dissolution, reproductive years lost due to union dissolution, and the influence of union dissolution on fertility at the individual and population levels. He found that marital dissolution and repartnering are important drivers of fertility variation in sub-Saharan Africa, despite being neglected within the discourse of fertility transition in this region.

This project contributes to the advancement of family demography scholarship in sub-Saharan Africa and the Global South by positioning the role of marital dissolution and repartnering within the discourse of micro- and macro-fertility transition in this region, and by introducing novel techniques for analyzing the dynamics of union dissolution from incomplete marriage histories. Parts of this dissertation have been published in Population Studies, Demography, and Population and Development Review.