Jack Caldwell’s Contribution to African Social Science and Health

In 2009 a survey of population scientists ranked Professor John Caldwell, universally known as Jack, as the most respected demographer of all time. This presentation focuses on the earliest and most important segment of Jack’s work, his African research. In 1962 after gaining his doctorate at The Australian National University, Jack was appointed an Associate Professor at the University of Ghana, where his research led to the first two of his 27 books Population Growth and Family Change in Africa (1968) and African Rural Migration (1969).

His first visit to the University of Ibadan in Nigeria was in 1963, and in 1971 this institution became the base for the Changing African Family Project which funded and collaborated with researchers across 12 African countries from Ghana to Sudan.

Jack made an important part in the use of ‘mixed methods’ in demography. Having played a pivotal role in the World Fertility Survey, the lack of contextual depth in these surveys led him to incorporate anthropological methods in his work. In demographic grand theory, he is most famous for his intergenerational wealth flows theory as shown in his Theory of Fertility Decline (1980) which continues to be debated by African researchers.

Over many decades Jack had formed strong views on African sexuality. In 2004 he was presented with the United Nations Population Award recognising his research on framing the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa as “unparalleled”. 

Dr David Lucas is currently a Visitor in the School of Demography. Before joining the ANU as a demographer in 1976 he worked as an Economist/Statistician for the Governments of Basutoland (now Lesotho) and Kenya, and as a Population Council adviser at the University of Lagos, Nigeria.