ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a review of the road sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries have traveled in their endeavor to formulate population policies under diverse political, socioeconomic, and social-cultural environments, their achievements and challenges. Population policy has both narrow and broader perspectives in definition and content. The broader definition includes not only the factors that directly influence population processes but also all the social and economic measures that exercise either direct or indirect influence over population size, characteristics, and processes of fertility, mortality, and migration. Thus the scope of population policy includes population size, population growth rate, fertility and mortality levels, nuptiality, migration, age-sex structure, human resources utilization, and population quality. However, countries in the SSA region have enacted different population policies following global historical evolution of population policy development. Thus in SSA, population policy formulation is continuously evolving and has been influenced by international consensus, changing economic scenarios, political and social environment, and research.
