Child/Woman Ratio
This simple measure is not an accurate measure of fertility, it is more a measure of population structure. But it has its uses, one being that it is very easy to calculate in simple small area surveys and therefore quite attractive to certain NGOs wanting to make a simple assessment of the burden of support that young children place on families in a community.
It is constructed as follows, for a stated period or from a cross-sectional survey:
| Child/Woman Ratio = | living children aged 0 - 4 |
| women aged 15 - 49 |
Its problem as a true measure of fertility is with the numerator – it misses children who have died. In a high mortality situation numbers of these could be substantial and fertility will therefore be underestimated.
So as a fertility measure it is rather rough-and-ready but it can still tell you about the burden of children in a community. It is also used demographically as a measure of "youngness" in a population and is useful for that purpose. Another advantage of its simplicity is that it can be constructed from census data alone; it does not require information about births – but that means that it is not a true fertility measure.
It is normally a figure below one – considerably below one for low fertility countries, just under one for high fertility countries. This may seem a low figure for high fertility countries but even in these countries more than two children below 5 at any one time is relatively uncommon and this will be offset by numbers of very young women with no children and a considerable number of older women with no children under age 5. High fertility countries are also likely to have higher rates of child mortality, which would further reduce the ratio.