Africa: Africa’s demographics are driving global population growth

Sewage spilling into the streets, shacks for homes and shanty towns stretching into the horizon. This is New York in the late 1800s, its grim scenes famously captured by local reporter Jacob Riis, who took chance of newly-invented flash photography to portray the city’s hard scrabble life

The same was authentic of London, its own miserable conditions captured by the pen of Charles Dickens.

The images conjured are little different to what one finds today across a lot of developing cities, whether Mumbai or Jakarta. And the experience of the New Yorks and Londons shows that a lot of of today’s most liveable cities were once anything but. So, how do cluttered urban sprawls become cities? And how do Africa’s people trends compare to other regions?

The urban drive

Africa has its share of urban sprawls – from Cairo to Luanda, not to mention the slums of Kibera in Kenya or Khayelitsha in Cape Town. Huddled masses provide enormous challenges for public service delivery. But clusters of populations as well bring dynamism, with better rates of innovation and knowledge sharing. And they entice businesses, providing close-knit markets, which lower logistics and advertising costs.

People talk and share additional products and services at the same time as they live together. L’Oreal can visit hundreds of beauty stylists in a single day in Lagos, peddling their new products. And the financial services industry benefits from agglomeration effects, with Nigeria and Ghana notching solid increase in financial services on the back of their high urbanisation rates.

With around 41 % of the people presently thought to be in urban regions Africa is “completely a bit additional urbanised” than India, at around 30 %, says Arend Van Wamelen, principal at Mckinsey& Company. “At the same time as people move to a city their productivity goes up, there are additional opportunities to work, and additional providers of services at lower cost.”

Productivity is around four times higher in urban versus rural locales, and gain is twice as high in African cities compared to country averages. “Having consumers with higher incomes and additional concentrated geographically is, from a marketing point of view, much better,” says Mr Van Wamelen. Additional companies are presently thinking about city, rather than country, strategies.

Carrefour’s recent entry into eight African markets, following on the heels of Walmart, shows how urban increase can give rise to credible market request for formal food retail. Lagos stands out as an enormous consumer market, with Luanda growing quickly behind it. On current trends, Angola’s capital has one of the fastest urban increase rates and will be part the biggest cities in Africa by 2020.

Overbaked?

But urbanisation data is contested, with disagreements on methodologies, data-collection and definitions. Much is left to interpretation. Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, is a case in point. It is a city? At 7,315 km2, it is large enough, but it is better conceived as several agglomerations and villages. Even at the same time as Abuja’s people reaches 3 million in 2020, people density will still be around 400 inhabitants per km2, far lower than for any truly urban people.

The research institute Africapolis claims that – due to flaws in definition and methodology – urbanisation levels across much of west Africa had been overestimated by donor agencies.

But beyond problems of raw estimation, there are as well questions about the urbanisation process. The image of millions of rural Africans heading to the bright lights of the city is wide of the mark. Rural to urban migration is rarely a one-off, one-directional flow. Much is circular, as low skilled workers from rural regions try their luck in the city, fail, go home, and perhaps return again. They may find short-term opportunities and again return to the curbside. It is hard to monitor circular migrants, who work and live informally.

At a macro level, there are as well reversals, blips and regressions. In the 1990s, the share of the urban people shrank in Zambia, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali and the Central African Republic. The same happened in Zimbabwe between 2002 and 2012 as part of political efforts by the leading Zanu-PF party, inclunding slum demolitions.

And people moving to the city does not, in itself, suggest a transformational change. Structural changes, as experienced in the likes of London and New York, are additional significant. In Sierra Leone and Zambia, a lot of people move from rural to urban locales but, on arrival, continue their same livelihoods – growing vegetables in bathtubs, say, instead of on land. Structural shifts remain elusive in Africa, causing policymakers to worry that cities are expanding without providing the employment increase needed.

Demographic dividend?

Debby Potts, an urbanisation researcher at Kings College London, believes that the urbanisation story may actually be confused with a reality of people increase. And Africa’s people figures are certainly staggering. The continent had a fertility rate of 5.4 children per woman during the 2005-10 period – double that of any other region – and it is projected to decline only to 3.2 by 2050, still higher than other regions (the rate is under 2.5 in Asia, and below 2 in East Asia). Of the 10 nations with the highest total fertility rates worldwide, eight are in sub-Saharan Africa.

That fertility rate will additional than double Africa’s current people of 1 billion to 2.1 billion by 2050, and quadruple it to 3.9 billion by 2100, according to the people division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Half of projected people increase from 2012–2050 will be in sub-Saharan Africa. And Africa’s people rise – at a factor of 9.8 between 1950-2050 – is way beyond the corresponding increase factors for India (1920–2020) and Europe (1800–1900) in their centuries of people increase (5.5 and 2.2 respectively).

What does all of this mean for African development? Raw people size is not, in itself, good or bad. What matters is how the structure of the people changes. Strong economic performance in Asia over the last half century have been in part due to a ‘demographic dividend’ – the process by which fertility rates begin falling, meaning a large group of young people move from being dependents to being of working age, without a similarly large group being born ‘behind’ them. This changes the structure of the people, with proportionally additional people being in the ‘working age’ bracket. If the young people entering working age receive decent education, and are able to find employment and save money, fertility rates fall further.

Parts of East Asia and India have initiated that transition successfully, but what is the likelihood of African economies following a similar path? The data is not too encouraging. While there are indications that the youngest segment of the African people will start to shrink in number – by 2050, the % of the African people under 14 is projected to decline from 40 % to 31 %, while the % of the people between the ages of 25-59, the prime working ages, is projected to increase from its current 34 % to 45 % – the two ‘ifs’ of the demographic dividend are far from assumed. Available work and high educational attainment are both crucial to enable demographic change to boost development. But formal job creation is stagnant across the continent, educational outcomes are still completely poor compared to Asia, and savings rates are too low.

In Asia, fertility started to decline in the 1950s, which meant rising numbers of workers per dependent. This is happening in sub-Saharan Africa too, but later and additional slowly. Africa lacks East Asia’s high rates of savings and investment over that period, and the ‘Green Revolution’ was as well critical to broader Asian increase: Africa is from presently on to experience the same phenomenon.

With that in mind, people increase in Africa could prove a burden rather than a boon. “UN projections are based on a one-size-fits-all model for what is going to happen to the total fertility rate. Projections for Africa are made on that basis and there is no guarantee that the total fertility rate will fall in the same way it has in other places,” says Robert Eastwood at Sussex University.

There are positive examples in the African context, though. Botswana reduced the fertility rate from six children per woman in 1981 to 2.8 in 2010, entirely halving it in a 30 year period. This was thanks to countrywide free health facilities involving maternal and child health, and family planning. Improved health outcomes meant women did not feel compelled to have as a lot of children. Contraception availability rose from 28 % in 1984 to 53 % in 2007. Finally, improved educational access, inclunding exclusion of school fees for the poorest, raised the number of girls achieving education. All of these interventions combined worked to reduce the fertility rate.

Food, glorious food

The biggest downside risk to people increase, if other structural changes do not move in step, is growing food insecurity. One study from the University of California, Berkeley, argues that over the next 30 to 40 years, between 100 and 200 million people will be without sustainable food supplies.

History has been unkind to Thomas Malthus’ prediction that growing populations would run up against fixed resource constraints. There is little evidence of this having happened in the way he predicted. But Africa may follow a Malthusian trajectory, with conflicts – from Darfur to Rwanda – showing people and natural resource dynamics. While people size does not mean that there is less food to go around – China has a larger people than all of Africa and is able to feed itself – it does raise questions about whether Africa’s agriculture sector is up to the task. “This people increase poses a large regional food security challenge. This is by presently the world’s hungriest region, and it is going to account for 39 % of world increase in request for food calories by 2050,” says Craig Hanson, director of the people and ecosystems programme at the World Resource Institute (WRI).

There are two solutions to the food security problem, and both look elusive. The initial is to expand the acreage that is harvested for agriculture. But the WRI ran the numbers, and found that a conversion area the size of Germany, France and the UK combined would be needed to achieve this – with clear ramifications for conflict, land rights, water, carbon emissions and biodiversity. The second is intensification – in other words, increasing yields on existing farmlands. But data modelling performed by the WRI showed Africa would require a yield increase in cereals 50 % higher that the world average over the last 40 years.

Some regions look better prepared to cope with the food demands of a rising people than others. The Sahel, a one million square mile belt of arid and semi-arid land running from the Atlantic to the Red Sea, is one of the majority vulnerable regions, with geographers and health experts worrying about the combination of climate change, food insecurity and high fertility.

In 1950, the Sahel contained 31 million people. Today that figure is at over 100 million, and in 2050 could be additional than 300 million. There are cultural issues to address, particularly regarding gender, with experts pushing for better education of women through family planning, and action against child marriage.

High fertility rates are not inevitable in poor nations. Peru, Uzbekistan, and Bangladesh all reduced fertility rates of just under 7 in 1960 to around 2.5 by 2010, through voluntary family planning programmes, increases in education, and improvements in child survival – and all three were classified as poor in 2011, ranking 87th, 139th, and 166th out of over 180 nations in per capita gain. It may be cultural norms, rather than poverty, which obstruct evolution to a lower fertility rate. Patriarchal cultures – inclunding some in the Sahel and northern Nigeria – display persistently high fertility rates as a result of social norms prejudiced against women.

If family planning and education initiatives are not forthcoming, trouble brews. Malcolm Potts, a professor in people and family planning at the University of California, Berkeley, believes the Sahel region is set to suffer a ‘mega catastrophe’. While technical interventions on food security can help, the task is political and requires confrontation against deeply held social norms, particularly with regards the role of women in society. In northern Nigeria, the mean age of marriage is 14.9 years. “That is sexual slavery, a human rights abuse, but as well – these women who are married in their teens and have two children by the time they are 20 – will at no time manage their fertility. We have to do something to keep girls in school,” argues Professor Potts. In most nations with total fertility rates of 2.1 children per woman or lower, 80 to 100 % of women of childbearing age have attained at least a lower secondary education.

Adding climate change to this mix further worsens the outlook. Projections currently suggest a rise of between 3°C to 5°C above today’s by presently high temperatures by 2050. At the same time as crops are exposed to prolonged temperatures above 29°C, they often fail. “People statistics are telling us that by the middle of this century crops will have withered and livestock will have died, in a region that will have 300 million people,” says Professor Potts.

Africa’s success of the last decade has been real, and the signs are everywhere to see. But in the face of a people growing this quickly, those gains will need to be accelerated if the continent is to avoid simply treading water, or falling backwards.