864m more people will live in its urban areas in 2050 than in 2010 - the equivalent of adding the population of Europe. Unfortunately, all these tragic trends could be forecast from the state of African demography. Outside of Africa, the steady decline of fertility means that population growth will likely end in this century. North Africa has had a much higher rate of migration outside of Africa, with many north Africans working in the Gulf oil countries and, more recently, refugees from the Libyan civil war seeking asylum in Europe. In 2016, Africa as a whole emitted 1.33 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, less than Russia by itself. However, in Africa, extended family child-care systems have developed that allow women to avoid this trade-off. The World Health Organization’s (WHO) Global Health and Aging report attributes the increase in elderly population to a change in causes of death, from infectious to non-communicable diseases. Other articles where Population growth is discussed: Kenya: Demographic trends: Kenya’s accelerating population growth from the early 1960s to the early 1980s seriously constrained the country’s social and economic development. Oil rose from less than $20 a barrel in 1999 to more than $145 in 2008. To be sure, Africa has benefited from the surge in commodity prices over the past decade. (See Figure 4), With an average across sub-Saharan Africa of a 31% high school completion rate for males, and 24% for females, the vast majority of African youth are unlikely to have the skills to compete with workers in south Asia or north Africa, nor to work with machinery. If you are interested in telling stories in an impactful way to shine a spotlight on a particular issue, please email us. He thus concluded that both the level of economic development (especially education) and a distinctive pro-natal culture in sub-Saharan Africa contribute to Africa’s unique fertility dynamics. Western Africa was similar to middle Africa, with fertility rising and remaining close to seven children per woman up to the late 1980s, then falling slowly, but a bit further than in middle Africa, reaching 5.5 by 2010––2015. There are several direct consequences of overpopulation:. Figure 1 shows the difference between the decline in fertility from 1990–1995 to 2010–2015 projected by the United Nations Population Division in 1995 (shown in orange) and the actual decline in fertility as revealed by on-the-ground Demographic and Health Surveys two decades later (shown in grey).12 As can readily be seen, the UN fertility projections, based on analyzing the pattern of fertility decline in other developing regions, anticipated fertility reductions of .5 to 1 child per woman more than was actually observed. Table 1 shows how the UN’s projections for Africa’s total population in various regions for 2050, as made in 2010, differ from their projections made in the 2017 revision, published in 2018. We test this hypothesis with a path analysis of how modernizing factors affect fertility in Africa vs. other developing regions. Unless that decline significantly accelerates, Africa as a whole would not reach replacement fertility of 2.1 children per woman for 110 years, well into the next century. The table below shows that from 2020 to 2050, the bulk of the world's population growth is predicted to take place in Africa: of the additional 1.9 billion people projected between 2020 and 2050, 1.2 billion will be added in Africa, 0.7 billion in Asia and zero in the rest of the world. Yet it managed to reduce its fertility and improve its education and economic infrastructure so that it was poised for rapid growth in the following decade. UN population projections for Africa’s largest and fastest growing countries in millions, FASTEST GROWING COUNTRIES (Not Already Shown Above), To be sure, vigorous programs of state-led family planning, coupled with increased education, could bend these curves. Prof Mark Collinson of the South African Population Research Infrastructure Network (SAPRIN), the Medical Research Council and the Wits Rural Public Health and Health Transitions Research Unit (Agincourt), says that in the last 20 years fertility rates in Africa have dropped, the working age population has risen and dependency ratios (the number of dependents supported by the working age population) have declined. In the latter regions, men were the primary field workers, while women worked at textile and other domestic tasks that were undertaken inside the home and combined with child care. From now until 2050, the major goals must be coping with the consequences of unavoidably rapid population growth and yet still working to lower fertility as quickly as possible so that after 2050 Africa can achieve sustained high growth in income per head. advancing ideas defining a free The population growth rate has been slowing, however, from peak annual rates in excess of 2 percent in the late 1960s, to about 1 percent currently, to half that by 2050. Overcrowded countries such as the Philippines, India, … Otherwise, even a modest increase in Africa’s per capita emissions will make it impossible for more developed countries to make meaningful reductions in the world’s carbon loading. Yet on average, female education is the single most important factor in reducing fertility in tropical Africa. Fertility rates in African countries with the highest and lowest rates of fertility change, 2005–2010 to 2010–2015, excluding small island states. Unfortunately, with the backing of foreign capital, mainly from China, over 100 coal-powered electric plants are in various stages of planning or development in Africa.54. Western, middle, and eastern Africa have thus shown a dramatically different fertility path than other parts of Africa and other regions of the developing world. Most important is getting women into the workplace. Africa’s CO2 output per person is thus a mere 1.1 tons per year. In Europe, there is a greater mix, with half of sub-Saharan migrants coming from Nigeria, South Africa, Somalia, Senegal, Ghana, Angola, Kenya, the DRC, and Cameroon. Only very few countries have fertility declining at double-digit rates over this period. Women’s employment—whether for young women or for all women—has no significant impact at all! Almost all of them will be converging on cities, looking for a better life than they had in the countryside. The Democratic Republic of the Congo is projected to have 100 million new urban residents by 2050, Egypt 85 million, Ethiopia and Tanzania 75 million. That is possible; if assistance cannot be given in place, or if refugees are not welcomed in neighboring countries, those desperate for survival might undertake the costs and risks of trying to get to Europe. It might be tempting to dismiss these numbers as simply fantastical. This will matter mainly in terms of regional instability, extremism, climate change and disease, and international migration. The decline in fertility rates combined with increased life expectancy in most parts of the world means not only a slowing of population growth but also an older population. Exports of agricultural goods are possible if Africa’s vast lands are more profitably used for high-value farming and animal husbandry; Kenya and Ethiopia are already among the world leaders in cut flowers, as well as high-value specialty tea and coffee. Several states in northern Africa—Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco—along with South Africa, Botswana, Cabo Verde, and Djibouti, with median age around 23–25, are on track to reach the 50% threshold in the next decade. For Africa to achieve similar fertility reductions in the next 30 years will be difficult. Demographics can have a profound effect on the economy. With a handful of countries being primarily responsible for this growth, about 83 million people are being added to the population each year even though it is expected that fertility levels will continue to decline. In addition, lower infant mortality, women’s employment, and women’s education all also contribute to rising birth intervals; indeed these factors seem to impact fertility entirely through greater spacing of births rather than changes in desired family size. Europe and America also are facing huge future costs of funding their national and local pension and health care systems with a shrinking labor force. Rapid progress in reducing fertility could only have a major impact in the second half of this century. For example, in Nigeria, the urban population is expected to grow from 87 million to 287 million. Put another way, if by 2060 Africa achieves the same emissions level per person as India today, then even if China, the United States, India, Russia, Japan, and Germany were ALL to cut their CO2 emissions by 20%, that would not offset the increases to CO2 output from Africa. This means that even considerable declines in fertility in the next few decades will not have a major effect on population growth until after 2050. This massive population growth means rapid urbanisation. But this is change projected over only two generations, or about 85 years. For Africa as a whole (and sub-Saharan Africa as well), infant mortality has fallen by 29% in just the last decade, from 2000–2005 to 2010–2015. But if cities are overwhelmed with migrants, the construction of transport, housing, electricity, and sanitation lags behind, creating vast slums of substandard housing, rutted roads, and squatters. Just how many of us are there and how is our rising population affecting human health? That is about one-tenth the GDP of East Asia or of Europe and under three percent of total global output. In either case, they are ill-placed to make demands about shaping family size. The differences—due to an expected decline in fertility that simply did not occur—are striking. Africa will therefore have, by the second half of the century if not earlier, a surfeit of a commodity that is becoming increasingly rare in the rest of the world—young workers. literature. To deprive the world of that talent by lack of education and opportunity would be a tragedy for all of mankind. In southern Africa, where fertility was six children per woman in the 1960s, the level fell to four in the late 1980s and down to 2.71 in 2005–2010. And it should be recalled that Africa is, historically, a vast and underpopulated continent. From the 1950s, fertility in Africa actually rose slightly, reaching nearly seven children per woman by the early 1970s. In northern and southern Africa, fertility began a steady decline. That is, as Bongaarts has argued, “the response of fertility to development could be fundamentally different in Africa than elsewhere in the developing world.”16. If all of Africa were to accelerate its fertility decline to the rates achieved by Kenya, Rwanda and Ethiopia, of 13–15% per year, then Africa’s total population would only reach 3.1 billion instead of 4.5 billion by 2100.31 Yet the change to mid-century would be modest; the UN “low fertility” variant projection still forecasts an African population of 2.3 billion by 2050 (instead of 2.5 billion in the “medium variant”). What does this constant growth mean? By contrast, in eastern Africa in the late 1980s, fertility was still above seven children per woman. to lower the rate of population growth has increased steadily in Africa since the mid-1970s, from 25 per cent in 1976 to 60 per cent in 1996 and 72 per cent in 2013 (table II.1). have written, it is now clear that the impact of demographic conditions on a state’s “security, democracy, and development is significant and quantifiable.”44 They note that: The finding that countries with very young populations are more vulnerable to conflict holds true despite the maturation of age structures globally at the end of the twentieth century. Moreover, as the left column shows, fertility decline is slow or absent in many countries where fertility is quite high, from 4.0 to above 6 or even 7 children per woman. Most of them will be young and eager for work, but unless things change radically, they will be poorly educated and poorly prepared for work. Social science has made great progress in understanding the implications of rapid population growth. Only a few countries suffering from high infant mortality had smaller declines: Burundi, Somalia, Central African Republic, Chad, Benin, and Mauritania. That compares with 1.8 tons per year in India.52. Conflict, or the threat of conflict, promotes the seizure of power by autocratic leaders. In sum, the reason that tropical Africa continues to have extraordinarily high fertility is rooted in both this region’s distinctive extended family culture and its deep deficiency in secondary education. While this explanation would account for the low rate of fertility decline observed in Africa, and even the rise in fertility observed from the 1950s to the 1970s, it too has difficulties. Table 4. But in sub-Saharan Africa, the most powerful factor driving changes in the birth interval is women’s education. © 2020 by the Board of Trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University. That statistic has proven yet another reminder of the population boom in Africa’s most populous country. The population density of Angola and Somalia today is only 24 people per square kilometer; Tanzania is at 65, the Democratic Republic of the Congo is at 37. Table 2. The UN medium variant projection for developed countries shows their population peaking in 2054, and for less developed countries excluding the least developed countries (most of which are in sub-Saharan Africa), peak population is projected to be in 2077. For most resources, whether it be minerals or fossil fuels, if they are rare in Europe but cheap and plentiful elsewhere, international investment flows in to refine and upgrade the resource and export it to Europe. In this model, fertility is affected most strongly by desired family size, though the effect of birth interval is also highly significant. The finding that education was the most consistently significant factor supports the suggestion by Goujon, Lutz, and Samir that Africa’s “fertility stall” reflects a lack of progress in educational attainments.17, In Figure 2, I show a path model for the determinants of fertility in developing countries excluding sub-Saharan Africa. By 2040, twenty-five years from now, sub-Saharan Africa is projected (again, by the UN medium variant) to have 1.8 billion people, making it more than twice as populous as all of Europe (including Russia). According to Adepoju, in sub-Saharan Africa the brain drain is becoming brain circulation within the region, especially from parts of Africa to Cote d’Ivoire, Gabon, Botswana, and South Africa. In the 1960s, imperialism was thrown off and most African countries gained their independence, but Africa’s role as mainly a source of raw materials remained. Moreover, while provision of secondary education is weak across the board, with sixty percent of youth aged 15 to 17 in sub-Saharan Africa not in school in 2017, girls’ exclusion from higher secondary education is even worse, and particularly at lower income levels. Demographer Joel Cohen has forcefully made the case for the effects of secondary education in high fertility societies. Could Tanzania go to 300 million by 2100, or the DRC to nearly 400? The costs are divided Africa today includes giant countries with populations near or exceeding 100 million (Egypt, Ethiopia, Nigeria) and tiny countries with populations under 1 million (Comoros, Djibouti, Cabo Verde, Reunion, Mayotte, Sao Tome and Principe, Seychelles). Population growth rates continue to pose lingering challenges to development efforts on the continent. In fact, there are some surprising and marked differences. But it remains to be seen if this can keep up with the forecast urban growth. But by the 1980s, this had increased by almost a third, to 2.8% per year. This would kick off a virtuous circle in which, as fertility fell, more money could be invested per student and worker, raising productivity further and leading to sustained and rapid economic growth. Thus, this variant assumes that Nigeria, whose fertility declined by 3% in the five years 2005–10 to 2010–15, will in the future experience a fertility decline of 6.6% every five years to 2050. Then with improvements in mortality and other indices of economic development, fertility steadily declined. Ideally, Africa’s population growth, and the entry of African populations into the global economy as workers and consumers, would recapitulate the success stories of Eastern Asia. Figure 1. A report from Cornell University suggests that malnutrition makes people more susceptible to life-threatening diseases like malaria and respiratory infections. This paper will lay out the main aspects of Africa’s population dynamics in the coming decades, focusing on trends in mortality, fertility, population growth, labor force growth, and urbanization. He writes: Although there are other factors at work, in many developing countries, women who complete secondary school average at least one child fewer per lifetime than women who complete primary school only. A WHO report published in 2005 explains that overpopulation “is a breakdown of the ecological balance in which the population may exceed the carrying capacity of the environment.” This means weakened food production, leading to inadequate food consumption and malnutrition. They are thus likely to be left to agriculture and the informal labor market, and low-productivity and low-income work—unless this changes.34. Africa is also potentially a source of international risks in regard to climate change and disease. It will also be the source of virtually all labor force growth in the world, and by far the youngest region, in the 21st century. In Asia and Latin America, fertility was similar to that in Africa in the 1950s, with about six children born per woman during her lifetime. Almost all tropical African countries, including “good” performers like Kenya and Rwanda, are at 40 to 50% of their population aged 0–14. Indeed, as shown in Figure 4, labor force growth (increase in the population age 15–59) in sub-Saharan Africa is far faster and greater in numbers than in any other region of the world, including China and India. The latter risks were brought home with the outbreak of Ebola in the United States in 2014. Second, even for the latter regions, the rate and amount of their fertility decline is not comparable to what happened in other developing regions at similar levels of income and development. If this proves to be a sustained trend, rather than just a blip, it would contribute further to overall African growth. Africa is unique not only in the speed of its population growth, but in the fact that this growth is driven by high fertility and falling infant mortality. Indeed, the median age for Africa as a whole is just 19.4 years. The countries of the Middle East and North Africa, after rapid population growth and then progress in their demographic transition, enjoyed decades of economic growth and rapid educational expansion prior to the outburst of revolutions in 2010–2011. Effects of overpopulation. But where will 200 million additional city-dwellers go? Africa's Demographic Transition : Dividend or Disaster?. By 2050, Africa’s 1.1 billion person population is slated to double, with 80% of this growth happening in cities, bringing the continent’s urban headcount up to more than 1.3 billion. The most populous African … Rapid progress in reducing fertility could only have a major impact in the second half of this century. Sadly, these are likely to be only marginal developments. Syria also was affected by climate change, as a severe drought disrupted rural areas and spurred urban migration. Indeed, probably the single most important investment for international donors that can be made in Africa’s future—both for the earning capacity of its population and stemming the flood of population growth after 2050—is to target universal secondary education for both sexes. The high school completion rate among the male population up to age 21 is under 15% in Burundi, Niger, Madagascar, Burkino Faso, Mozambique, the Central African Republic, Gabon, Zimbabwe, Mali, Ethiopia, South Sudan, and Senegal. Non-significant effects are shown as dotted arrows. It is only through their effects on this factor that other development changes seem to matter, as shown by both the path analysis in Figure 3 and Bongaart’s multiple regression showing that when total fertility, contraceptive prevalence, and desired family size are regressed on education, income, life expectancy and urbanization, only education is consistently significant. (See Figure 2), If we run the same path analysis on African countries, we would perhaps expect, following Bongaarts, that these relationships would still obtain but be weaker, or that, following Goujon, Lutz and Samir, that education would have a larger impact. note: As long as extended families provide working women (not only agricultural workers, but ones in urban areas having paid employment as well) with relatives who are willing to come and assist with household tasks and child care, paid female employment may not only make a far smaller contribution to fertility decline in tropical Africa than that observed in other regions, but it may also actually delay fertility reduction in Africa by slowing the trend toward the nuclear family system.21. It is widely known that there are problems in the quality of education in developing nations. If, as has occurred to date, the “high variant” projections become the new “medium” projections, the forecast population for Africa in 2050 would be almost 2.8 billion, or 600 million more than the 2010 medium forecast of 2.2 billion. Africa’s Secondary Education Gap, Growth Projections for Africa: 2050 and Beyond30. To date, sub-Saharan Africa has been a modest contributor to global labor migration. These regions thus followed the pattern of other developing regions, with about a one-decade delay. “This can usher in a golden moment when there are relatively few young and few old, and hence a large working age to non-working age ratio.”. Multiple effects of climate change could drive an estimated 65 to 129 million people into poverty in the same period. 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While just over a third of Africans lived in cities in 2010, 56.5 per cent will be urban-dwellers by 2050. Even if sub-Saharan Africa’s economies prosper, that is not likely to resolve the problems of political disorder. But the large number of children is not a blessing for families. Indeed, the countries of East Asia benefitted from a “demographic dividend” during their period of rapid population growth.35 But this only occurred after three conditions were met: (1) Fertility continued to decline so that the dependency ratio—the number of children to be supported by working adults—fell. Africa’s unique high fertility regime will produce high rates of population growth in coming decades. To some degree, construction and service jobs grow in parallel with urbanization as expanding cities create their own demand. “The resources – monetary and otherwise – that would otherwise have been absorbed by raising children and supporting large families can be invested in productive and household savings,” says Collinson, who describes this phenomenon as a potential ‘demographic dividend’. The UN medium variant projection generally assumes that countries with higher fertility will shift to a more rapid decline in coming years. Join the Hoover Institution’s 80% of that comes from just six fossil fuel dependent industrializing countries: South Africa, Algeria, Nigeria, Libya, Egypt and Morocco. The Syrian surge turned out not to have been a great economic burden for Europe but had immense political consequences. The United States will need an additional one million immigrants per year for the next 35 years just to get back to the 2050 population that was expected a decade ago! A fast-growing population and labor force could be a boon to the economy. The proximate determinants are desired family size and birth interval, which together shape total fertility.20, In the path model, positive effects are shown by red arrows, negative effects by blue ones, with the strength of the effect shown by the thickness of the arrow. They note that this region (corresponding to eastern, middle, and western Africa) was characterized by hoe-based agriculture, in which women were the primary daily field workers, as opposed to the plow-based agriculture that prevailed in north Africa, Europe, and Asia. You may note that I have given population totals here for “Africa” and not just sub-Saharan Africa. As can be seen, there is wide variation. According to Bongaarts and Casterline, “… the median pace of change in sub-Saharan Africa (0.03 per year) is less than one-third the pace in the other regions [Asia and Latin America] (0.12 and 0.13, respectively).”10 Indeed, the behavior of fertility in sub-Saharan Africa is wholly at odds with the idea that economic progress determines the pace of fertility decline; as Bongaarts has shown, fertility rose when the region’s GDP/capita was relatively high in the 1970s, then began the onset of fertility decline in the early 1990s, when GDP/capita had fallen considerably, and then encountered a widespread stall in fertility decline in the 2000s, when GDP/capita had been rising more rapidly.11. It also includes countries where fertility rates are exceptionally high, exceeding six children per woman (Niger, Somalia, Chad, DRC, Mali) and countries where fertility has fallen to replacement levels (2.1) or below (Tunisia, Mauritius). A rule of thumb for much of the developing world is that the rate of growth of urban areas is twice that of the population as a whole. If the global economy grows at 3% per year, and Africa’s economy were to grow consistently at 5% per year, it would take 70 years for Africa to be generating even 10% of global economic output; even though by that time Africa would likely have over one-third of the world’s population. However, fertility remains high in most cases, even in countries where fertility decline has been rapid. This would include provision of humanitarian aid for larger populations likely to be affected by extreme climate events and provision of peace-keeping and refugee settlement and support for populations likely to be affected by rebellions and civil wars. The government is implementing the second half of this century the problems Political! Years, and Sierra Leone African labor be viewed similarly a … effects of change. 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