A scatter plot illustrates the well-established inverse relationship between women's education and fertility.
A fitted line summarizes the well-established inverse relationship between women's education and fertility: across countries, women with more education tend to have fewer children.
Countries in Western, Middle, and Eastern Africa (highlighted in black) cluster in the upper left, characterized by limited women's educational attainment and high fertility. Somalia sits at the extreme: the lowest mean years of women's schooling in the dataset (0.9 years) alongside the highest total fertility rate (6.4 children per woman).
At the opposite end of the distribution, countries in Northern, Western, and Eastern Europe (highlighted in black) cluster in the lower right. Mean years of schooling among women in these regions range from 12.5 to 13.4—among the highest observed globally—paired with fertility rates well below the replacement level fertility rate of 2.1 children per woman.
Nepal (highlighted in red) is a clear outlier in this scatter plot. Mean years of schooling for women aged 25 and older is around 3.5 years—among the lowest in the dataset. This finding in part reflects a late start to mass education under the Rana regime, which suppressed formal schooling until 1951 (Bhatta & Mehendale, 2021). Progress has since accelerated sharply—lower-secondary completion among girls rose from just 8% in 1990 to near-universal parity (89%) by 2024 (UNESCO, 2026). However, because the dataset's measure reflects the average across women aged 25 and older, the data mostly reflects the disadvantages faced by older generations rather than recent gains. At this level of female schooling, comparable countries in the dataset have fertility rates in the range of 4 to 5 children per woman. But Nepal's fertility rate is 1.9, below the world average of 2.2.
This gap is largely explained by large-scale male labor migration. Nepal's net migration rate of -12 per 1,000 population is among the largest outflows in the dataset, and the resulting spousal separation among married couples has direct impacts on fertility (Shattuck et al., 2019).