 Following World War II, fertility rates were relatively high around the globe, but then we saw a very dramatic decline in most continents around the world, except for sub-Saharan Africa, where fertility rates have actually remained very high there, four to six to sometimes seven children per woman, depending on which country or which region you're looking at. The question is why are fertility rates so high in Africa and why have they sustained at those high levels? Demographers would look at it from what they call approximate determinants of fertility, looking at age of marriage, contraceptive use, abortion, breastfeeding practices. Economists would look at preferences for children, so do families in Africa just want more children? I take an interdisciplinary approach in looking at this issue of sustained high fertility in Africa. And I think that one of the reasons why we have sustained high fertility in Africa is that there's a positive fertility response to crises. What I mean by that is following a crisis there's actually an increase in childbearing from women, and this is over and above the trends that we see for people who are not exposed to crises. This could happen for two reasons. It could be that there are more crises in Africa, and so people have this response of increased childbearing following a crisis, or it could be because there's an elevated response, particularly in Africa, that people respond in Africa with this increase in fertility following a crisis. Resilience is the capacity of an individual community or nation to rebound from a crisis. It's their ability to adapt and transform in response to a crisis. Attachment to parents, education, religion and mastery. And what I focus on is attachment to parents. And in the child development literature it's really easy to see from the child's perspective how we gain resilience from the attachment to the parent. But in my research I'm looking at it from the mother's perspective and how they have children to build their own resilience. So we're looking at the woman and she's getting resilience from having the child. And what it is is that women in a time of crisis, they're stripped of everything, but they have a child. It's something that is theirs. And it's really something that really empowers the woman by having this child. She's a mother. She has a sense of agency with this new identity. My research looks at girls who were born into war, and then across their life course, when do they have their first child? And I compare girls who were born into war with girls who were not born into war in the Sub-Saharan African context. And I find that girls who were born into war go on to have their child seven months younger than girls who were not born into war. And this is exaggerated by an education effect. So if you're born into war and you have no education, then the age at first birth or the age at which you'll go on to have your first birth is very, very young. Compared to if you do have education and you were born into war, then it seems that the education is nulling that sort of resilience response. And we don't see any difference between the age at first birth of girls born into war with high education and girls not born into war and high education. And there's no difference in birth. One of the problems of having children at a very young age is it actually puts the women on a trajectory of poverty and isolation. And so the resilience and the strength and the security that they were seeking from having that child, from the formation of a family, doesn't materialize. It was a method that they used to adapt, but it doesn't transform them. The policy message here is that we need to find factors that will help women promote their resilience that's not childbearing. Childbearing we saw was adaptive but not transformative. Education on the other hand is adaptive and transformative.