Africa’s biggest story of the future may be quietly unfolding
Such stories of big families inform much of how the world thinks about sub-Saharan Africa, not just now but over coming decades. At conferences and in cabinet meetings across the continent, politicians and policymakers fret about how to educate, employ, house and feed a population that theexpects to grow at breakneck speed from around 1.2bn people now, to 3.4bn people by 2100.
These declines bring west Africa closer to the lower fertility rates seen in much of southern Africa. Dropping rates have already been celebrated in places such as Ethiopia and Kenya . Demographers would be more inclined to agree that these fertility declines are real and likely to continue if they could easily identify their causes. In Ethiopia, Kenya and Malawi, past plunges have been strongly associated with higher use of contraception, often thanks to big government pushes. In Malawi and Kenya well over half of married women use modern contraception such as the pill or injectables, while in Ethiopia about 40% do.
Research by Endale Kebede, Anne Goujon and Wolfgang Lutz of the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital suggests that a stall in Africa’s demographic transition in the 2000s may have stemmed from the delayed effect of cuts in spending on education in the 1980s, when many African economies were in crisis. The rapid falls in fertility rates that now seem to be taking place could be because of the huge push to improve girls’ schooling in the past few decades.
In the past many African politicians were suspicious that Western eagerness to promote family planning was a ruse to keep African countries from growing populous and strong. Such attitudes are rarer these days. Alas, another form of muddle-headed thinking has taken root among Western environmentalists, who link Africa’s population growth to climate change.
Nor is it because high population growth necessarily means economic growth per head is low. “It’s not very clear that we have the data to be able to say for sure that the population growth rate itself is bad or good,” says Anne Bakilana of the World Bank. Richer places have fewer children and higher savings rates. But teasing out the causality is tricky.
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