A
TERM PAPER
ON
UNDERSTANDING DEMOGRAPHIC TRENDS AND DEVELOPMENTS IN AFRICA
BY
MADUEJEGBU ESTHER NNEKA
MATRIC NUMBER 129086035
COURSE CODE –SOC 807
TITLE- SOCIOLOGY OF DEVELOPMENT
LECTURER: PROF. ADEDOKUN

Understanding Demographic Trends
Demographic trends reveal developments and changes in human population. More specifically, demographic trends relate to changes in a population’s age, gender, geographical location, marital status, educational attainment, employment status, household income, race, religion, and health.
Africa is the second-largest and second most populous continent on earth with an estimated population in 2013 of 1.033 billion people. Africa is home to 54 recognized sovereign states and countries, 9 territories and 2 de facto independent states with very little recognition. Africa's population is not too large in relation to land area, but to reproducible capital, research and educational facilities, the entrepreneurial class, leadership and the available channels of economic diffusion. The UN PopulationFund stated in 2009 that thepopulationof Africa had hit the one billion mark and hadthereforedoubled in size over the course of 27 years. It's now estimated that Africa has a population of 1.033 billion people in 2013.

The Population Fund’s Director Thoraya Obeid spoke to the BBC at the time and underlined the reasons behind the growing population. "Africa countries are all growing fast... because there is large number of women who have no access to planning their families" she said. "It's an African phenomenon of a large growing population and a large percentage of young people in the population."

Africa Population Growth and Life Expectancy
56countriesmake up thecontinentof Africa and while populationgrowth is relativelylow in someareas,countries such as Nigeria and Uganda are increasing at an advanced rate. In most countries in the continent, the population growth is in excess of 2% every year.

In addition, there is a high proportion of younger people within the Africa population as a whole and the life expectancy is also low – less than 50 in many nations. This has reduced considerably over the course of the last twenty years with a widespread HIV and AIDS epidemic taking much of the blame for that statistic. Infant mortality is also extremely high and in Angola, it is reported that there are 190 deaths per 1,000 live births. All of these statistics could be expected to lead to a fall in population numbers but in Africa, the issue over family planning leads to the reverse effect.

As far as demographics are concerned, the African nations as a whole are made up from such a diverse set of components that it is impossible to list them in full. However, in certain parts of the continent there has been an increase in Asian and even European settlers which has also served to boost the population statistics as a whole. In former British colonies, this can be seen extensively and Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and South Africa are all good examples as to a growing set of diverse ethnicities. The population in Africa has grown rapidly over the last 40 years and it has a relatively young population, with more than half of the population under 25 in some states.

Most Populous Countries in Africa Nigeria: 173,611,131 Ethiopia: 95,045,679 Egypt: 82,196,587 Democratic Republic of the Congo: 67,363,365 South Africa: 52,914,243 Least Populous Countries in Africa Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha (UK) (non-sovereign): 4,000 Seychelles: 93,033 São Tomé and Príncipe: 194,161 Mayotte (France): 217,000 Cape Verde: 501,674.

Africa Population Growth
Any expert would find it hard to argue with the commonly held view that the population of Africa in 2013 and beyond is set for further increases. With little or no measures in place to address the issue, the 1.9 billion prediction for 2050 is entirely plausible. Africa currently has a very low population density of about 65 people per square mile, which puts it behind Asia, Europe and South America. The population of Africa is currently projected to quadruple in just 90 years, with a growth rate that will make Africa more important than ever to global economy and more. Africa's Nigeria is currently one of the most populous countries on earth and, as China's population shrinks and India plateaus, Nigeria will reach nearly 1 billion people by 2100 and come close to surpassing China. This is pretty amazing considering the country is about the size of Texas. Nigeria is set for one of the biggest population booms in world history and it's expectedto increase by a factor of eight in just two or three generations.

The boom in Africa's population will be in sub- Sahara, including in countries like Tanzania, which is one of the poorest countries on earth. Just 13 years ago, the country's population was 34 million, which has now grown to 45 million but is projected to reach 276 million by 2100, which is close to the current population of the U.S. Many consider Africa's population growth a bit frightening, with predictions placing the continent's population at 1.9 billion by 2050. By 2100, 3/4 of the world's growth is expected to come from Africa, reaching 4.1 billion people by 2100 to claim over one third of the world's population. Most countries will at least triple in population as the region has very high fertility rates and very little family planning in most regions. As much of Africa is still developing, and it contains some of the poorest countries on earth, time will tell how it will sustain such massive population growth. Now estimated at 925m, the number of sub-Saharan Africans grew from 186m in 1950 to 859m in 2010, at a staggering 2.6% average annual rate. It is forecast to reach 1.2bn in 2026 and 2bn in 2050, when one in five people on the planet will be African – growing at a lower rate than earlier, but still the highest in the world for decades to come. This high growth rate is driven largely by high fertility rates, on average 5.2 children per woman (compared to a world average of 2.5).

Youth surge: Half of population increase over next decade will be younger than 25 Today, 571m sub-Saharan Africans (62%) are under 25years of age, 386m (42%) are under 14 years of age. Only3% of the population is over 65. The median age is 18.6,the lowest in the world (developing world: 26.5;developed world: 39.6). With fertility rates as well aschild mortality rates declining since 2000, working-age adults have become the fastest-growing populationsegment. The ratio of working-age people to dependantsis consequently on the rise. Out of a 440m increase insub-Saharan Africa’s population over the next decade,half will be below 25 (and one third below 14). This could give economic growth a boost, as long as employment is available.

More urban: From one third of population today to one half by 2035. Today, around one third of sub-Saharan Africa’spopulation lives in urban areas. Around 2035, it may behalf of it, as rural poverty and hope of employment pushpeople towards the cities. In sub-Saharan Africa like inAsia, the extremely high rural population growth ratesof the 1970s and 1980s are moderating. If properly managed, urbanisation can propel social and economicgrowth as urban centres emerge as hubs of innovation,human networking and employment. Cities experienceproductivity gains through clustering, creativity andrandom connections, especially at a time when valuegeneration and innovation increasingly involve breaking down silos.

Economies of scale also allow companies to offer low-cost goods. On the flip side, it is also a challenge for governments toprovide a fast-rising urban population with basicservices such as education, health services, housing,drinkable water, electricity and waste disposal. Slumsmay continue to expand with limited job creation andcontinued under-investment, resulting in risks for public health and public order if public investments are notadequate to address availability of low-cost housing andcreate jobs. This also means that a growing number of sub-SaharanAfrica’s children are brought up in urban environments.The city with the largest number of children in the worldin 2025 is expected to be Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, the sixth largest Lagos, Nigeria and the 17th Luanda, Angola. This has implications for education as well as health. With a population of around 11m, Lagos isone of the 21 cities in the world with a population ofover 10m. Its expected growth rate for 2010-2030 is thehighest among this group: at 75% it is well above that ofthe next fastest growing cities in this group, at around50% (Delhi, Beijing, Dhaka and Shenzhen).

The employment challenge
Economic growth in Africa is creating employment but not on the scale required to absorb new marketentrants. Africa’s youthful population can result in a dividend, but only if enough jobs are created. Sub-Saharan Africa’s decade of growth has done little to alterunderlying labour market conditions. For example, in Uganda, waged jobs grew at 13% a year between 2003and 2006 but this absorbed less than one in five newlabour market entrants. Sub-Saharan Africa’s totallabour force is projected to increase by 70% between2000 and 2020. Few signs of structural transformation, In order to be job-intensive, growth must be accompanied by the reallocation of economic resourcesfrom activities with low productivity to more productiveones. This structural transformation encompasses boththe rise of new, more productive activities (i.e. ‘withinsector’ productivity growth) and the movement of resources and labour from traditional activities to thesenewer ones (‘structural’ productivity growth).

In Africa,within sector labour productivity growth has beenslower than in other parts of the world but structural labour productivity growth has started to take place,with labour moving from less productive activities to more productive ones since 2000 – less than in Asia butmore than in Latin America. The degree and the path of the ongoing structuraltransformation vary within sub-Saharan Africa. Most oil exporters have seen sustained increases in averagelabour productivity through spillovers into the non-oilsector. Most middle-income countries have experiencedboth labour productivity growth in the agriculturalsector and a declining share of the sector in GDP.

The problem of population growth and control in Africa is somewhat complicated. While there are too many people in some areas of the continent, there are too few in others. To a large extent, this peculiarity has been a function of such factors as the slave trade, ethnic wars, migratory movements and indiscriminate balkanisation of Africa by colonial powers. As a result, Africa displays the unique feature of being overpopulated and under-populated concurrently. In some areas, the choice is between increased starvation and effective population control. In others, it is between positive population increase and increased starvation. In some cases, population control appears to be detrimental to economic growth. In others, population control is crucial to economic growth. Granted, a generalised treatment of the dynamics of population growth and control in African cannot but belie the inherent divergences.

African giant Various “guesstimates” suggest that the total population figure for Africa is now around 1 billion. It appears that while the continent covers 25% of the world's land area, it has only about 15% of its population. In effect, Africa is actually under-populated relative to such other continents as Europe and Asia. Africa has a population density of only 33%, relative to 70% for Europe and 87% for Asia. However, Africa has a relatively high population growth rate; something in the range of 4.8% per annum in 2013, up from 3.4% in 2011, according to the International Planned Parenthood Federation. If current demographic trends persist, it is projected that the African population will reach 1.4 billion by 2025. According to UNICEF, by 2050, it is projected that one out of every three children born in the world will be an African. That provides amazing food for thought. The highest increase in new births in the world between now and 2050 is expected to occur in Nigeria. By 2050, Nigeria's population is projected by the United Nations to be 389 million, rivalling that of the United States at 403 million. By the end of the century, the U.N. projects that Nigeria's population would be between 900 million and 1 billion, nearing that of China which would by then be the second most populous country in the world after India. The reason for this is because while Nigeria's population would continue to grow geometrically, China's population is expected to begin to shrink by 2030. Today, Africa has the youngest population in the world. 200 million Africans are between 15 and 24 years old. This young population is expected to more than double by 2050, when as many as 800 million Africans are expected to be between the ages of 25 and 59.

This is expected to provoke a dramatic shift in the working population of the world. Today, China has the advantage of having the largest labour force worldwide. But soon, China will be replaced by Africa. According to these projections, by 2050, one out of every four workers in the world is likely to be an African. This African labour force would be young and relatively cheap. Therefore, it is to be expected that multinational companies of the West looking for cheap labour would be inclined to move their businesses to Africa, instead of East Asia. This means Africa's population boom offers great opportunities for Africa's future economic transformation. This can happen, provided Africa's human capital is harnessed productively, and channelled towards appropriate sectors of the economy, in response to changes in the international economic system. However, at the same time, Africa's population boom poses grave threats to the region's political stability and social cohesion if sufficient economic and employment opportunities remain unavailable for expected newcomers. For this reason, in the short-term, unchecked population growth in many an African country has important implications for social and economic development. It cannot be justified on the simplistic basis of the need to promote rapid industrialisation through the creation of economies of scale. These remain essentially a function of the “size” of the market; that is, of the effective domestic demand. Gains in “size” are more readily achieved by increasing income per head than by increasing the number of impoverished peasants. For the time-being, this should be sought primarily through regional integration and international trade rather than by population growth.

In Africa, this can only be generated by a fundamental transformation of the society and its modes of thought through economic development. The harsh reality is that, despite family-planning initiatives, the only effective means of population “control” has been death by starvation or famine. In recent years, some of the poorest nations have experienced food shortages, which increased the death-rates and consequently slowed population growth. Under-population There is yet another side to the population coin in Africa. There, the issue appears to be, not over-population but, under-population. In the vast territory which includes Benin, Cameroon, Cote d'Ivoire, Gabon, Central African Republic, Chad and Togo, an area six times the size of France, has only 77 million people to France's 63 million. In such countries, the objective of some family-planning programmes has been essentially that of spacing births rather than discouraging them. Even in those areas where over-population is the issue, the problems of positive population control have ensured that planning often focuses on the effects on mothers and babies of large families, and of children born in rapid succession. In the final analysis, the issue in Africa is really neither population growth nor its control. Rather, it is economic development. “Over-population” is not a condition that is intimately related to numbers in the abstract, without regard to land fertility and technical and economic development. Otherwise, Africa would definitely not qualify as over-populated. Neither can the continent really be considered as “under-populated” since there is very little evidence that an absolute lack of manpower is holding up d

Policymakers cannot afford to ignore the impact of demographic trends and indicators on the achievement of major development goals, including poverty reduction, old-age and health security, and provision of public services and infrastructure. This section constitutes a “tasting menu” of demographic changes and policy options, and previews the expert in-depth analysis forthcoming in CGD’s Demographics and Development lecture series.

(i) Poverty and inequality
Demographic factors affect poverty levels and inequality within and among countries in fundamental ways. At the micro level, fertility levels affect household economic wellbeing; at the macro level, the “demographic opportunity” associated with the transition from a majority youth population to a large productive-age population influences unemployment and economic growth rates; and globally, immigration is both a cause and a result of differing levels of economic development. A cohesive approach to reducing poverty and inequality requires understanding linkages to demographic change at each level.

Fertility and poverty- In aggregate terms, we see across all developing countries over time a strong inverse relationship between fertility and per capita income, and fertility and life expectancy—two common indicators of well-being. We also see a positive relationship between total fertility rates and poverty across developing countries, as shown in Figure 5.

Many countries experience a high fertility-poverty trap in which low incomes may exacerbate high fertility rates and vice versa. Life expectancy is also much lower among countries with very high fertility, compared to the entire group of developing countries.

Almost every country in the very high fertility category has an average life expectancy of less than 55 years, implying again a trap wherein low life expectancy and high fertility are inextricably linked.
These traps are plausibly caused by the poor health conditions (reflected in indicators such as high infant and maternal mortality and inadequate public health services) and poor living standards (poor employment opportunities, malnutrition, low rates of educational achievement) that exist in these countries. High fertility is a common element among them but it is virtually impossible to determine whether the poverty and low life expectancy traps are caused by high fertility or create high fertility.