| Yeah, yeah. If the actual birth rate in Africa is half as much as claimed, I’d be shocked. |
Our future will be African. By 2100, one in three people on the planet will be African according to all demographic forecasts. Relative to other continents, this growth in Africa is unprecedented in human history.
Because one in three people will come from sub-Saharan Africa, Nigeria’s population will exceed that of China or India. Within less than three decades, the Democratic Republic of the Congo will have 200 million inhabitants and Abidjan, the capital of the Ivory Coast will have 10 million people.
In the Sahel the overall population of at least four countries will triple, according to Gilles Pison, professor at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris (MNHN — Sorbonne Universités) and associate researcher at INED.
The African population, estimated at 140 million in 1900, reached one billion inhabitants in 2010. It will number 2,5 billion in 2050 and more than 4 billion in 2100, according to United Nations projections. One in 6 people today lives in Africa. In 2050, it will be 1 in 4, and more than 1 in 3 by 2100, according to these same projections.
This rapid increase is because of the excess of births over deaths, with four times more births than deaths. Although the mortality on the continent may be the highest in the world, and fertility has also declined, African women were still giving birth to an average of 4,5 children each in 2017, compared to more than 6,5 forty years ago.
By comparison, only 2,1 children were born per woman in Asia in 2017, 2,0 in Latin America, 1,9 in North America. and 1,6 in Europe. So even if fertility continues to decline, as the average United Nations scenario assumes, this will not immediately result in a significant decrease in the growth rate.
Assuming that African fertility suddenly falls to 1,6 children per woman as in Europe or China — a highly improbable scenario — the population would however continue to increase for a few more decades to reach nearly 1,6 billion in 2050. Africa’s population includes many young adults of childbearing age, and therefore the result would still be a high number of births.
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If you pay any attention to who is appearing in television commercials (Woke primer or target audience driven possibly), you might think we were living in Nigeria, Malawi or Chad.