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 defi nition and content (Weeks 2001; Odimegwu and Oyedokun 2001). The narrow defi nition tends to focus on socioeconomic policy making and planning. The broader defi nition includes not only the factors that directly infl uence population processes but also all the social and economic measures that exercise either direct or indirect infl uence 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 (United Nations 1994; Oucho, Akwara, and Ayiemba 1995; Tarver 1996; Odimegwu and Oyedokun 2001).
