Research Article Determinants of Change in Fertility among Women in Rural Areas of Uganda Paulino Ariho 1 and Abel Nzabona 2 1 Department of Sociology and Social Administration, Kyambogo University, Uganda 2 Department of Population Studies, School of Statistics and Planning, Makerere University, Uganda Correspondence should be addressed to Paulino Ariho; arihopaulino@yahoo.com Received 25 April 2019; Revised 7 August 2019; Accepted 14 September 2019; Published 19 December 2019 Academic Editor: Luca Marozio Copyright © 2019 Paulino Ariho and Abel Nzabona. is is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Fertility among rural women in Uganda continues to decline. Studies on fertility in Uganda have focused on the overall fertility in the country. In this study, we focus on determinants of change in fertility among rural women in Uganda using a multivariate Poisson decomposition technique to quantify the contribution of changes in the socioeconomic and demographic composition of women which we also refer to as the characteristic effects and changes in their fertility behavior (the coefficients’ effects or risk of childbearing) to the overall reduction in fertility among women in rural areas during the 2006–2016 period. e “characteristics effects” are used to mean the effect of changing composition of women by the socioeconomic and demographic characteristics between 2006 and 2016. On the other hand, fertility behavior also presented as coefficients’ effects mean changes in the risk or likelihood of giving birth to children by the rural women between the two survey years. Our findings indicate that the mean number of children ever born (MCEB) reduced from 4.5 to 3.9 in 2006 and this reduction was associated with both the changes in composition of women and fertility behavior. e composition of women contributed to 42% while the fertility behavior contributed to 58% of the observed reduction. e education level attained and the age at first sex showed significant contributions on both components of the decomposition. e observed decline in fertility is largely associated with the variation in the risk of childbearing among the rural women. e variation in the risk of childbearing by education and age at first sex of the rural women showed to be the biggest contribution to the observed change in fertility. Continued improvements in access, attendance, and completion of secondary schools by women in rural areas will be the key drivers to Uganda’s overall transition to low fertility. Furthermore, with improved access to mass media in the rural areas, there can be changes in attitudes and large family size preferences which can create a conducive environment for the utilization of family planning services in the rural communities. Efforts should therefore focus on applying appropriate methods to deliver packaged family planning messages to these communities. 1. Introduction African fertility has been higher than in other developing countries in the past several decades and this persistent high fertility has been linked to the low level of socioeconomic development relative to other developing regions [1]. Although the African fertility has been exceptionally different from that of other regions, Africa has remarkable fertility diversity which is in fact increasing with the fertility situation ranging from pretransitional to replacement fertility [2]. It is generally agreed that fertility rates have declined glob- ally but debate on why fertility rates have declined remains significant [3]. Many theories and frameworks explaining fertility change have been propounded. e major explanation of fertility change and dynamics has its origins in demographic transition theory (DTT) first developed by ompson in 1929 and Notestein in 1945 [4]. is theory attributes fertility decline to changes linked to industrialization and urbanization that initially produce a decline in mortality and later fertility decline. is theory has however been found to be weak in explaining fertility transition in less urbanized and industri- alized countries. e wealth flows theory propounded by Caldwell in a 1976 essay attributes fertility decline to the nucle- ation of the family which may be triggered by either economic or cultural forces [5]. is theory was based on studies con- ducted in West Africa (Ghana and Nigeria) where extended Hindawi Journal of Pregnancy Volume 2019, Article ID 6429171, 13 pages https://doi.org/10.1155/2019/6429171