Africa's Population Bomb

The climate emergency grabs all the headlines, obscuring the threats posed by our rapacious over-consumption of dwindling resources and our overpopulation problem.  

On population growth, Africa is the great unknown but it's chilling.

In 2022 the world’s population will pass 8 billion. It has increased by a third in just two decades. By 2050, there will be about 9.5 billion of us on the planet, according to respected demographers. This makes recent comments by Elon Musk baffling. According to him, “the low birthrate and the rapidly declining birthrate” is “one of the biggest risks to civilisation”.

The populations of more than half of Africa’s 54 nations will double – or more – by 2050, the product of sustained high fertility and improving mortality rates. The continent will then be home to at least 25% of the world’s population, compared with less than 10% in 1950. Expansion on this scale is unprecedented: whereas the population of Asia will have multiplied by a factor of four in this timeframe, Africa’s will have risen tenfold. “Chronic youthfulness”, as demographer Richard Cincotta has termed it, is the result: 40% of all Africans are children under the age of 14 and in most African countries the median age is below 20.

Let's unpack that. This year the global population, just 2.5 billion when I was born, will pass the 8 billion mark. By 2050 that's expected to hit 9.5 billion.

Africa, which at my birth represented just 10 per cent of the global population, will swell to 25 per cent by 2050. Remember, that's 25 per cent of 9.5 billion, close to the total global population when I was born. And, over that span of roughly 70 years, we have greatly increased both longevity and per capita consumption.

Absent from these projections is how Africa will be impacted by climate breakdown compounded by a rapidly burgeoning population.  Parts of Africa are already plagued with food insecurity.

The most recent estimates show that 281.6 million people on the continent, over one-fifth of the population, faced hunger in 2020, which is 46.3 million more than in 2019. This deterioration continues a trend that started in 2014, after a prolonged period of improving food security.

By 2050 Africa may not be able to support the projected growth.