This thesis seeks to examine the effect of food shortages on marital fertility in Malawi for the period of 1987-2009. Malawi provides an interesting case for studying this relationship, since the country has experienced many instances of food shortages in the studied period. The study was done by using the 2004 and 2010 Demographic and Health Survey for Malawi to utilise the retrospective data available in this data source. The food shortages were then defined based on periods of production decline, since there were some difficulties in terms of using the response based on maize prices. The results show that there appear to happen some changes in the marital fertility response during the examined period. However, the main findings of this study pertains to the different regional responses to food shortages. This might indicate that different survival strategies limit the marital fertility response to food shortages in the South and North region of Malawi. This does not appear to be as strong for the Central region, which indicates that the survival strategies here might present challenges for the population during food shortages.