By Edward Paice
This certainty demands greater recognition in the West and much more proactive adaptation from most African governments. A new reality is dawning.
Since independence, Africa has undergone, in the words of one population expert, “the greatest demographic upheaval in history”. In 1950, the continent accounted for less than 10 percent of the global population. By 2050, one-quarter of the world will be African by birth.
Conversely, Europe’s population will have declined from 20 percent of the total to less than 10 percent in the same time span.
Africa will account for more than half of the global population growth over the next three decades. Within a generation, there will be more Nigerians than Americans, and the populations of both Eastern and Western Africa will have soared past those of Europe or Latin America.
By the end of the century, Africans will conceivably account for 35-40 percent of the world’s citizens. This is not a population ‘explosion’, as it is often labelled; rather, it is a mega-surge, a massive tectonic shift in demographic composition.
Africa will be the key determinant of when the global population finally peaks – an issue of signal importance to climate change projections, food security and much else besides.
The youngest continent
What caused such rapid and sustained growth? There are two main drivers:
In 1950, life expectancy in Africa was less than 40 years. Today it is more than 60 and set to reach almost 70 by mid-century.
Meanwhile, the total fertility rate (TFR) – the average number of live births per woman – remains above four. It will still be higher than three in 2050. By then, the population of about 60 countries worldwide will be in decline.
Some – Italy and South Korea, for example – could see their populations halve in the 21st century if they fail to raise fertility rates above replacement level.
The most striking feature of Africa’s mega-surge – both a cause and consequence –is its youthfulness. The median age of Africans in 2020 was just 18.6 years – 24.4 in Northern Africa and 17.5 in the sub-Saharan region.
This is well below even the average of 27.9 years for countries designated ‘less developed’ by the UN, materially so in the case of sub-Saharan Africa.
In three decades, the median will have climbed to 23.9 years, but this will still be way below the global average of 35.9 years and less than half the figure for Eastern Asia.
One-third of African countries have an under-18 majority. About a dozen have a median age below 16 years, including DRC, one of Africa’s most populous countries. In Chad and Niger, the median is below 15 years. By 2050, 40 percent of the global under-18s will be African.
Youthful age structures and current reproductive patterns will underpin annual growth above 2 percent for at least another decade. In a dozen countries with a population higher than 10 million, growth continues above 2.5 percent a year.
More than 1.5 billion babies will be born in Africa by 2050. By then, about 40 percent of all children born each year worldwide will be African.
This is an astonishing example of reproductive primacy ever exhibited by any other world region in history.
No ‘African’ demography
When writing Youthquake – Why African Demography Matters, the extraordinary diversity on show for me was even more arresting and fascinating than youthfulness. So great is this diversity that it is, in a sense, misleading to refer to ‘African’ demography.
The TFR in South Africa, Morocco, Libya and Tunisia is at ‘replacement level’, a little above two births per woman, whereas Nigerienne women have seven children on average.
Even where fertility rates are similar, the demography of African countries is as fundamentally different as their respective histories.
In most of the world, improving access to education for girls has been associated with lower fertility. This is true of many African countries as well. But in Nigeria, the TFR is almost 4.5 births, even among women who have completed secondary education.
Among secondary-educated women in DRC, it is almost six. In Ghana, widely considered a continental leader in female secondary education and the usage of modern contraceptive methods among the highest in Africa, the TFR remains close to four – just one birth lower than in the 1990s.
More affluent women, and those who live in towns and cities, usually want fewer children.
"In Malawi too, high usage of modern contraceptive methods has not yet led to the fertility rate falling much below four"
Yet Angolan women in the richest quintile have four children on average, those in DRC have almost six, and in Uganda and Nigeria, almost four.
In Addis Ababa, women may have fewer than two children on average, but that is a historical anomaly among Ethiopia’s urban settlements – and in urban Nigeria, the fertility rate is 4.5.
Across Africa, there are as many exceptions as conformers to global ‘rules’. Substantial variation is the norm between and within countries.
Africa rising
Over the past year, the big news stories about population have focused on Elon Musk’s insistence that low and rapidly declining birth rates worldwide are “one of the biggest risks to civilisation”; on the ‘crisis’ of China having a population in decline; of China being overtaken as the most populous country in the world by India; and on the global population reaching the 8 billion mark, an increase of a third in just over 20 years.
Seldom is Africa’s increasing prominence also mentioned, or the global implications of its growth considered. The same is true within Africa: in most countries, public discussion of demography is rare.
The extent to which Africa’s demographic surge is overlooked is anomalous.
In the West, it is symptomatic of the poor grasp of the continent’s basic geography. Africa is often referred to, and conceptualised, as if it were a single country rather than 54 – almost one-quarter of the global total.
Traditional ‘flat’ maps direly misrepresent the continent’s dimensions. The US, China, India, Europe and Japan would all fit comfortably within the African landmass.
Despite centuries of familiarity with Africa, the West does not know the continent at all well and still shows little interest in remedying the ignorance. This urgently needs to change, and the principal objective of writing Youthquake was to improve awareness, inside Africa as well as outside, of its demographic revolution.
Why does this revolution, this mega-surge, matter? This is a
Why won’t it matter is more apposite. Africa will produce about half of the growth in the global labour force in the coming decades. A much larger population will, alongside economic development and abundant resources, influence global trade patterns.
In geopolitics, Africa’s burgeoning size has played a role in prompting greater foreign policy attention (and investment) from China, UAE, Türkiye and India. It is now inconceivable that this will not lead to greater prominence in global decision making bodies, as the courting of African countries by nations on both sides of the divide over the Ukraine war has demonstrated.
Africa will be central to the fight to stem global warming and combat climate change. The influence of Africa and Africans on sport, music, fashion and religion is ever-increasing.
In short, there is little in the coming decades that won’t be affected by a more populous Africa.
Edward Paice is Director of Africa Research Institute, a London-based think-tank. His latest book is Youthquake – Why African Demography Matters
Disclaimer: The viewpoints expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect the opinions, viewpoints and editorial policies of TRT Afrika.
