That compares with 1.8 tons per year in India.52. Fertility then sharply diverged in different regions. 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. Tropical parasites and diseases, which reduce human and animal productivity, are being conquered. Yet if Africa fails to do so, the ever-larger swelling of its population will mean that its economic lags and political instability will only increase and become an even greater burden for the international system later in the century. This has now changed with remarkable speed. Absent truly unselfish and creative leadership, global investment, and drives to enlist labor in vast projects, Africa will be awash in under-employed youth converging on sprawling cities across the entire landscape. In an essay by Aderanti Adepoju of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Migration Human Resources Development Centre, Adepoju says that the distinctive features of migration include increasing female migration, diversification of migration destinations, transformation of labour flows into commercial migration, and emigration of skilled health and other professionals. Population growth rates continue to pose lingering challenges to development efforts on the continent. From 2010 to 2017, Europe received nearly one million asylum applications from sub-Saharan Africans who reached its shores, more than half of them in the three years 2015–2017; the United States received fewer, about 400,000 from 2010 to 2016. By contrast, women’s employment has no significant effect at all on fertility, not through family size nor through birth intervals. If, say in 2025 a combination of climate disaster and civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (estimated population then of 104 million) or Ethiopia (126 million) or South Africa (62 million) broke out, might it also send millions of refugees streaming toward Europe? To be sure, Africa has benefited from the surge in commodity prices over the past decade. Whether it is the hundreds of military coups that have taken place in African countries since independence, or the civil wars and genocides that swept across central, west Africa and Algeria in the 1990s and the multiple rebellions that have occurred in western Africa since 2000, the continent has been a byword for political instability. Now it is ‘all, except in designation, a dictatorship,’ according to the country’s influential Conference of Catholic Bishops.”40 In Uganda, President Yoweri Museveni has held onto power for 32 years, changing the constitution as needed to remain in office indefinitely.41. That is to be expected, as increases in income and urbanization will lead to higher per capita fuel and electric consumption. 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. The costs are divided And tropical Africa severely lags other developing regions in providing women with secondary education. 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. It might be tempting to dismiss these numbers as simply fantastical. 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. (See Figure 1), Table 1. 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 Democratic Republic of the Congo is projected to have 100 million new urban residents by 2050, Egypt 85 million, Ethiopia and Tanzania 75 million. In regard to climate change, much of the world’s fate depends on what happens in Africa. 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. Although the numbers in Table 2 are for female enrollments, those for men are not much better. 80% of that comes from just six fossil fuel dependent industrializing countries: South Africa, Algeria, Nigeria, Libya, Egypt and Morocco. With the exception of a few regions, notably sub-Saharan Africa, fertility levels have been falling worldwide in the past two decades, resulting in slowing population growth. Moreover, in sub-Saharan Africa, but not other developing regions, women’s education also has a significant direct impact on desired family size. That is, Africa has invested mainly in primary education, leaving a great deficit in secondary education. Yet they also exhibited a huge increase in youth population and urbanization, severely unequal distribution of the benefits of growth, high degrees of corruption and political exclusion, and struggled to keep up with prior commitments to subsidize food prices, fuel, and government employment. Sadly, these are likely to be only marginal developments. 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. Generally, population patterns are diverse. As Hertrich has explained, changing Africa’s high fertility will require changing the conditions that both lead to higher desired family sizes and weaken women’s ability to assert their preferences if they desire fewer children.59 That means empowering women through later marriage and greater education. The share of the population living below the national poverty line decreased from 30% in 2011 to 24% in 2016. 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. 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. It would also include provision of social media campaigns, information sharing, and well-trained police/gendarme forces to combat the spread of extremist ideologies and extremist actors. These regions thus followed the pattern of other developing regions, with about a one-decade delay. As can be seen, there is wide variation. Altogether, there are an estimated 4.15 million sub-Saharan Africans living in Europe in 2017 and 1.55 million in the United States55. This suggests that the vulnerability of countries with a very young population was not merely a result of the large numbers of institutionally weak states in the early stages of industrialization. Thus, it is almost impossible to expect Africa’s population to do any less than double by 2050, and that would be an optimistic projection. Africa's population is not only young: It is growing fast. Economic growth in many countries cannot keep up, poverty is on the rise. Other parts of the world also have growing populations, but that is mainly because their adult populations are healthier and living longer. 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. After 2040, labor force age groups will be shrinking everywhere in the world, except in sub-Saharan Africa. 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). By 2010, there was some hope that Africa was turning a corner, and that states such as Tanzania, Botswana, Mozambique, Rwanda, South Africa, Ethiopia, Ghana, Uganda and Zambia were leading the continent toward more stable and democratic government.38 The uprisings in 2010–2011 in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt were greeted with much hope as heralding an end to dictators and the spread of democracy. As Korotayev et al. 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! Content is produced in collaboration between Africa.com’s editorial team and our partners — including nongovernmental organizations, private sector stakeholders, agencies and institutions. Effects of overpopulation. Future population growth can only result to further degradation of our environment. (2) Investments were made to increase enrollments in secondary/vocational and tertiary education, reaching 100% for secondary/vocational enrollments. If done in an orderly way, this volume of migration is not a threat. 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. Women in cities, and women having higher education and higher incomes generally have lower fertility than women in rural areas and with lower education and lower incomes.15 Modernization factors thus have an effect on fertility in Africa, just not quite in the same fashion as in other developing regions. This “medium variant” projection still presumes that fertility in sub-Saharan Africa will fall from an average of 5.1 today to 3.0 in 2050–55 and 2.2 in 2095–2100. The pressures on Africa’s labor markets, urban centers, and political stability from the population growth that will inevitably occur by mid-century will be immense. If in fact fertility remains as high as 3.5 children per woman in 2050 and 2.65 in 2100, which is the UN “high variant” scenario, then Africa’s total population would soar to 2.8 billion by 2050 and 6.2 billion by 2100. In sum, Africa is different. The alternative, if this is delayed, is a vicious cycle in which fertility continues to decline slowly or stall, spurring continued growth of the young population, making it harder to provide secondary education for all youth, and leaving less to invest in workers. From 1950 to 2007 malnutrition increased by 37% and is linked to six million child deaths a year. By the late 1970s, total fertility had fallen to four, and then by the early 2000s to well below three. Higher economic growth brought with it positive trends in poverty reduction in both urban and rural areas. While most will simply move to larger cities in their own country or to other countries in Africa or the Middle East, most who are surveyed say that their first choice of destinations is Europe or the United States But even if the number of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa to the United States and Europe were to double, or even triple, in the next three decades, the annual numbers would be less than 600,000 per year to Europe (out of a projected population of Western Europe in 2050 of 457 million, or 0.13 percent), and less than half that to the United States (or about 0.08 percent). Adepoju also states that remittances received by the migrated worker have been increasing notably and are a lifeline for poor relations left behind as they are able to pay for basic services such as healthcare, education and to enhance agricultural production. But, while migration causes a ‘brain drain’ which can have negative consequences in areas such as health where access to health is impacted negatively by the emigration of skilled healthcare workers, and is compromising millennium development goals, it is not all bad. society. What are the prospects for a major increase in migration from these and other countries? 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. It was 3.5 million half a century ago; now it stands at 20 million. This is because of “demographic momentum.”. But by the 1980s, life expectancy surpassed 50 years, and by 2010–2015, had reached 60 years—a 50% increase. Then with improvements in mortality and other indices of economic development, fertility steadily declined. The sudden flow of foreigners to Europe’s borders raised fears of loss of identity and control among Europeans and promoted authoritarian governance.56 If roughly every decade a major crisis were to send 500,000 to one million African refugees to Europe’s borders, that could have the effect of periodically exacerbating identity crises and political extremism, reinforcing populist regimes, and doing sustained damage to European democracy. There are several direct consequences of overpopulation:. In this model, fertility is affected most strongly by desired family size, though the effect of birth interval is also highly significant. A growing population with disparitites in distribution can add strain to the environment to feed people. Rapid progress in reducing fertility could only have a major impact in the second half of this century. At present there are already violent extremist movements active in Nigeria (Boko Haram), Somalia (al-Shabab), Uganda (Lord’s Resistance Army), Mali (Al Qaeda in the Islamic Magreb), and elsewhere. Given the rapid decline in mortality that Africa has enjoyed, and the still high fertility that it maintains, the future will be one of extremely rapid population growth. The net effect of migration on population size can be reasonably approximated, however, from census counts and vital statistics. Teachers do not show up for classes, educational materials go missing, and effective testing, feedback, and cumulative growth in skills are often lacking.23 These problems are not unique to tropical Africa; they are found in many developing nations, especially in south Asia, where fertility has nonetheless declined. In Niger in 1998, for example, women who completed secondary education had 31% fewer children (on average, 4.6 per lifetime) than those who completed only primary education (6.7). The variation in the continent is too great. Rising incomes lead to lower infant mortality, and have a direct effect on increasing birth intervals, thus reducing fertility. Thus, it is almost impossible to expect Africa’s population to do any less than double by 2050, and that would be an optimistic projection. In middle Africa, which had fertility of about six children per woman in the 1950s, fertility continued to rise all the way up through the late 1980s, reaching 6.76 in 1985––1990. argue that the “right” to extended family childcare is rooted in longstanding cultural patterns distinct to tropical Africa. Outside of Africa, except for a few small Pacific Island nations, and for the tribal Islamic countries of Yemen, Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq, there are no other nations, much less regions, with a fertility of even 4.0. When women shift to paid work outside the home this pattern simply continues and allows women to enter paid labor without worrying about child care.22 These cultural patterns buffer the effect of women’s employment on childbearing. The “demographic window” for favorable development opens approximately when the population under age 15 falls below 30% of the total population, and the proportion of people 65 and older is still under 15%. You may note that I have given population totals here for “Africa” and not just sub-Saharan Africa. A more likely answer would be an interactive combination of modernization levels and cultural factors, such that certain regions of Africa—western, middle, and eastern Africa—have distinctive cultural patterns that affect the impact that economic development has on fertility. But by 2018, it had become clear that many of these states have joined the global trend toward the reassertion of strongman, autocratic rule. To deprive the world of that talent by lack of education and opportunity would be a tragedy for all of mankind. Could Tanzania go to 300 million by 2100, or the DRC to nearly 400? Join the Hoover Institution’s By 2018, the new “medium variant” projection for the population of sub-Saharan Africa in 2050 is higher by 337 million people (15.4%) than the projection made just eight years before. Indeed, the median age for Africa as a whole is just 19.4 years. 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. 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. How is this possible? It includes countries where fertility is rising (Algeria, Egypt, Tunisia, Seychelles), countries where fertility is high but stable, falling by less than 1% per year (Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, and ten others), and countries where fertility is high but falling very rapidly, 2.5% per year or more (Ethiopia, Rwanda, Kenya, Malawi, and Sierra Leone). Syria also was affected by climate change, as a severe drought disrupted rural areas and spurred urban migration. In the United States, for example, the recent fall in fertility to record low levels has resulted in the U.S. Census reducing its population forecast for 2050 from 439 million (forecast in 2008) to 390 million (latest forecast in 2017).57 That means in 2050, the United States will have almost 50 million fewer people—most of them prime working age—than was expected just ten years ago to pay into social security and Medicare to support seniors; and that is with recent immigration rates of one million per year being sustained to 2050. The benefits of larger families, as well as the costs, are thus spread over a large extended family grouping, rather than the spousal couple.26 Completing secondary education makes it possible for young women to have the skills and confidence to assert themselves against these pressures and gain the ability to limit their childbearing if they choose to do so. As late as 1980, sub-Saharan Africa had just 372 million people, and Africa as a whole had 480 million; at this time Asia had 2.6 billion people. In the coming decades, the number of travelers from sub-Saharan Africa to other continents, driven by increased population and higher incomes in Africa, is likely to increase by three or four times. Africa’s unique high fertility regime will produce high rates of population growth in coming decades. Figure 1. There are also shortages of skilled workers for jobs such as nursing and pharmacy and healthcare, shortages that will grow as the populations of Europe and America age. Or of Europe and under three percent of total global output one-third the population boom in by... In either case, they are ill-placed to make demands about shaping family size a different and more approach... Forty percent higher than India in 1950, the total population of Europe tertiary education, leaving great... 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