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CHILD SURVIVAL UPDATE 80/2009: AFRICA'S DEMOGRAPHIC TRANSITION AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

Wednesday, 16th of December 2009 Print

CHILD SURVIVAL UPDATE 80/2009: AFRICA'S DEMOGRAPHIC TRANSITION AND ITS
 CONSEQUENCES
 
 By coincidence, this article from The Economist, reproduced below, came to
 my attention the same day that I received an early copy of the newest
 Demographic and Health Survey for Kenya. In Kenya, the fertility rate of
 8.1 children per woman, seen in the mid-'70s, had declined by 2007 to 4.6
 children per woman.
 
 The total fertility rate is declining in much of sub-Saharan Africa, which
 is seeing the same demographic transition as East and Southeast Asia saw in
 the '70s and '80s. What are the consequences?
 
 Not treated in this article  is the length of  birth intervals, still one
 of the best predictors of child survival.
 
 Nonetheless, an interesting wake-up call for those who mistakenly regard
 Africa as the subject of sustained high fertility.
 
 Good reading.
 
 PS The Economist continues to be prolific on fertility declines. Their
 latest editorial on the subject can be accessed at
 http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14744915
 
 
 BD
 
 
 The baby bonanza
 
 
 Aug 27th 2009 | JABI, SOMALIA
 From The Economist print edition
 
 
 Is Africa an exception to the rule that countries reap a “demographic
 dividend” as they grow richer?
 
 
 IN JABI village, on the Juba River in southern Somalia, the mothers are
 mostly girls. They marry as early as 14 and have their first baby soon
 after. Their duties barely advance them above a donkey: childbearing and
 rearing, working in the fields, fetching water from the crocodile-infested
 river, sweeping faeces from the straw huts. Most have been raggedly
 circumcised. They have no contraception. There is no school. How many women
 in the village have died giving birth? “We cannot count the number,” blurts
 out Asha Hussein; she and the other women weep.
 
 
 To most people, this is the familiar Africa, a place of large families and
 high fertility, a continent in which societies are under extreme stress and
 where the young massively outnumber the old. Teeming, environmentally
 degraded, ravaged by poverty, hunger, HIV/AIDS and civil war, Africa
 appears the most plausible candidate ever to suffer a Malthusian disaster.
 
 
 Yet there is another Africa, an Africa whose people are charting a course
 more similar to that of the rest of the world: one where they are living
 longer, having fewer children, and in which more of their children are
 surviving infancy. Cities are restraining population growth, just as they
 have in Asia and Latin America. Addis Ababa, Accra, Luanda, may be fetid in
 parts—shockingly so for those coming from richer countries—but they have
 low fertility. An emergent African middle class is taking out mortgages and
 moving into newly built flats—and two children is what they want.
 
 
 Africa is still something of a demographic outlier compared with the rest
 of the developing world. Long berated (or loved) as the sleepiest
 continent, it has now become the fastest-growing and fastest-urbanising
 one. Its population has grown from 110m in 1850 to 1 billion today. Its
 fertility rate is still high: the average woman born today can expect to
 have five children in her child-bearing years, compared with just 1.7 in
 East Asia. Barring catastrophe, Africa’s population will reach 2 billion by
 2050. To get a sense of this kind of increase, consider that in 1950 there
 were two Europeans for every African; by 2050, on present trends, there
 will be two Africans for every European (see chart 1).
 
 
 Yet Africa is also starting out, a little late, on a demographic transition
 that others have already traced: as people get richer, they have fewer
 children. In 1990 the continent’s total fertility rate was over six,
 compared with two in East Asia. By 2030, according to United Nations
 projections, the total fertility rate in sub-Saharan Africa could fall to
 three. By 2050 it could be below 2.5. It is surely no coincidence that the
 past 15 years have seen Africa’s fastest-ever period of economic growth.
 Africa, exceptional in so many ways, does not seem to be an exception to
 the rule that, as countries get richer, they experience a demographic
 transition.
 
 
 That could outweigh all the bad news about civil war, desertification and
 HIV/AIDS. As societies grow richer, and start to move from high fertility
 to low, the size of their working-age population increases. The effect is a
 mechanical one: they have fewer children; the grandparents’ generation has
 already died off; so they have disproportionately large numbers of
 working-age adults. According to a study by the Harvard Initiative for
 Global Health*, the share of the working-age population will rise in 27 of
 32 African countries between 2005 and 2015.
 
 
 The result is a “demographic dividend”, which can be cashed in to produce a
 virtuous cycle of growth. A fast-growing, economically active population
 provides the initial impetus to industrial production; then a supply of new
 workers coming from villages can, if handled properly, enable a country to
 become more productive. China and East Asia are the models. On some
 calculations, demography accounted for about a third of East Asia’s
 phenomenal growth over the past 30 years.
 
 
 Africa’s people are its biggest asset. One day, its workforce could be as
 lusty and vital as Asia’s—especially compared with that of necrotic Europe.
 But there is nothing inevitable about the ability to cash in the
 demographic dividend. For that to happen, Africa will have to choose the
 right policies and overcome its many problems. If a country fails to
 address those problems, then the demographic dividend could become a
 burden. Instead of busy people at work, there will be restless, jobless
 young thugs; instead of prosperity, there will be crime or civil unrest.
 
 
 Africa does not have much time to get things right. The period of greatest
 potential, when the working-age population is disproportionately large, is
 not open-ended. In demographic terms, it is just a moment or two. Societies
 age, and as they do the number of older dependents grows and the moment
 passes.
 
 
 Africa has a generation or two to show whether it is, indeed, a demographic
 outlier as pessimists fear—one in which the dividend turns into a curse—or
 whether it is able to follow the path blazed by East Asia and reap the
 benefits of changing population patterns. Can Africa capitalise on the
 demographic dividend?
 
 
 Malthus’s fears
 
 
 There are three main reasons for pessimism. The first is that even today it
 struggles to provide for its people. Africa’s population is still growing,
 remember, even if more slowly because fertility is falling. And it still
 faces the classic constraints, identified by Thomas Malthus in the 19th
 century, of land and water.
 
 
 Africa today produces less food per head than at any time since
 independence. Farms are getting smaller, sometimes farcically so. Dividing
 village plots among sons is like cutting up postage stamps. The average
 smallholding of just over half an acre (0.25 hectares) is too small to feed
 a family—hence the continent’s widespread stunting. Africa’s disease burden
 extends to its animals and crops. Bananas, for example, are subject to two
 diseases—bunchy top disease and bacterial wilt disease—which can ruin 80%
 of a harvest. Scientists reckon 30m people who depend on the fruit are at
 risk; many of them live in conflict zones such as eastern Congo.
 
 
 If it is to feed its people, Africa badly needs a green revolution. In
 those parts with plentiful rainfall and rich soil—wet Africa—the prognosis
 is reasonably good. But in bigger dry Africa, such as in Jabi village,
 efforts to replicate Asia’s green revolution have so far failed. This is
 partly because Asia used large cropping systems and irrigation, which are
 unsuited to dry Africa. Partly, it is because African leaders and foreign
 donors have been almost equally indifferent to smallholder farmers and
 simple improvements to soil and seeds. Even if policy were right, small
 farms are slower than large ones to adopt better crops and farming methods.
 
 
 The task of providing for hungry and thirsty people will be complicated by
 climate change—a big difference from the demographic transitions in Asia
 and Latin America. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change thinks
 Africa will be the continent hardest hit. Even its best-case scenario (an
 increase in global temperatures of 1.1-2.9°C by 2100) could be ruinous.
 Equatorial glaciers will melt and river-flows fall, even as demand for
 water rises. The United Nations Environment Programme says 75m-250m
 Africans could go thirsty. That will mean girls will spend longer walking
 to fetch water which could encourage them to drop out of school and bear
 children earlier. On some estimates, an area of cultivable land the size of
 France, Germany, Italy and Britain combined will be ruined. The
 International Livestock Research Institute says large parts of Africa may
 soon be too dry for grazing, leading to conflicts between rival cattle
 herders or, as in Sudan’s Darfur region, between herders and settled
 farmers.
 
 
 These are predictions, not certainties. They do not necessarily mean the
 land cannot be made to support more people. Tree cover in southern Niger,
 for example, has increased tenfold since the devastating droughts of the
 1970s. A government decision to let farmers, rather than the state, own the
 trees, has made them more valuable by allowing locals to capture the
 benefits of harvesting bark, branches, seeds and fruits, meaning that
 locals are less likely to cut them down. Trees limit soil erosion; some
 “fix” the soil with nitrogen.
 
 
 Elsewhere, though, the losses are huge. Forests in Kenya have shrunk by at
 least 60% since 1990, mainly because more people are cutting down trees for
 fuel. It is doubtful whether Kenya’s government is strong enough to save
 the Mau forest on which Nairobi depends for water and hydroelectric power.
 And if Kenya cannot save a forest on which its capital depends, what hope
 is there for Congo’s rainforest?
 
 
 Thanks to its demographic transition. Africa will suffer less from these
 afflictions than it otherwise would. But it cannot remove them altogether,
 because the continent’s population will continue to grow, albeit more
 slowly. The hunger, poverty and strife this causes could gravely limit the
 demographic dividend.
 
 
 Which leads to the second reason for pessimism: Africa’s families are under
 greater strain than Asia’s or Latin America’s were when their demographic
 transitions first began. That means, pessimists fear, that African
 countries may fail to navigate the virtuous cycle of industrialisation,
 growing employment, increasing productivity and prosperity.
 
 
 One African in two is a child. The numbers are such that traditional ways
 of caring for children in extended families and communities are breaking
 down. In southern Africa, as a result of HIV/AIDS, an increasing number of
 families are headed by children. A recent report by the African Child
 Policy Forum, an advocacy group, says there are now 50m orphaned or
 abandoned children in Africa. It thinks the number could rise to 100m,
 meaning misery for them and more violent crimes for others.
 
 
 Millions of children already live rough in towns and cities. Prostitution
 and death await the poorest girls. The boys take to glue and crime. Africa
 has the highest rate of child disablement in the world. Some think 10-20%
 may be disabled, a staggering number, but since they are rarely seen in
 clinics and schools that is hard to verify. Paediatricians suspect some are
 killed in infancy—not Darwin’s natural selection but the dispensing of an
 extra mouth to feed. Physical stunting is probably rising.
 
 
 Throughout Africa the burden of disease weighs heavily. Between them,
 malaria and HIV/AIDS account for about a third of the continent’s 10m
 deaths each year. In the ten years to 1995, more than 4m Africans died of
 AIDS and many countries have ten times as many people living with HIV as
 have died. Most are between 20 and 59. So HIV/AIDS is damaging that very
 section of the population—working-age adults—on which the demographic
 dividend depends.
 
 
 If young people do not get jobs, or some stake in society, they may turn to
 violence. A Norwegian demographer, Henrik Urdal, reckons a country’s risk
 of conflict rises four percentage points for every one-point increase in
 the youth population. So Africa’s pyramids, wide at childhood and
 adolescence, are more promising than, say, barren Italy’s (see chart 2),
 but also more combustible. In some cities the rate of unemployment is 70%.
 The unemployed are recruited into militias or gangs for the price of a
 day’s wage. There was evidence of this after last year’s Kenyan elections,
 when politicians and businessmen stood accused of paying young men to turn
 parts of the country into war zones. Lots of underemployed young people
 mean too many hotheads and not enough elders. Paul Collier, an Africa
 specialist at Oxford University, thinks that in such circumstances young
 African men are “very dangerous”.
 
 
 The third reason for pessimism is Africa’s political violence, corruption
 and weak or non-existent governing institutions. According to the Harvard
 study, “institutional quality [is vital] for converting growth of the
 working-age share into a demographic dividend.” Here the continent scores
 much more poorly than Asia or Latin America did in the 1960s or 1980s.
 
 
 In the worst cases, civil war has meant that the demographic transition has
 not even begun. Fertility in Congo, Liberia and Sierra Leone—all torn apart
 by internecine fighting—has barely fallen. In Congo the rate is still six,
 just as it was in 1950. In the worst places, fecundity tends to track
 instability. Africa’s highest fertility rates are in the refugee and
 internally displaced camps in Sudan and Somalia, then in those countries
 recovering from war, then in famine-pocked patches of desert and scrub
 stretching from Mauritania to Kenya.
 
 
 Some Africa-watchers fear that parts of the continent may be getting
 trapped in a downward spiral: more babies mean more competition for
 resources, more instability—and more babies. Jared Diamond, a professor at
 the University of California, Los Angeles, thinks bits of the continent are
 already suffering a Malthusian collapse of a sort. The Rwandan genocide, in
 his view, was a result of too many people pressing on too little land, all
 overlaid with political tension. Recent collapses in parts of Mauritania,
 Chad, Sudan, Somalia and Kenya, to name a few, are taken by neo-Malthusians
 to have their roots in overpopulating marginal land, compounded by
 political failure.
 
 
 Yet such events also serve as reminders of how much can change. Twenty five
 years ago, Mozambique and Namibia were also being torn apart by war and
 Ghana was lurching from coup to coup. Now, these countries are peaceful,
 prospering and likely to benefit from the demographic dividend.
 
 
 Confounding Malthus
 
 
 Given half a chance, Africa shows what Malthus himself underestimated:
 innovation. The leapfrogging of decrepit state telecoms by profitable
 mobile telephone companies is one example. A basket of new technologies
 including wind and solar power stations, biofuel cookers and rainwater
 tanks could improve prospects for many rural Africans. Only 4% of the
 continent’s farmland is irrigated. Double that amount, add in fertilisers,
 seed, credit, information and proper metal warehouses (in some places a
 quarter of the harvest may be lost to rot and rats), and Africa might not
 just fill its own 2 billion stomachs, but export farm produce as well.
 
 
 Emerging Asia and Latin America have been able to absorb much greater
 numbers of people thanks to urbanisation. Africa’s rate of urbanisation is
 the fastest the world has ever seen, says Anna Tibaijuka, the head of
 Habitat, the UN agency responsible for urban development. In 1950 only
 Alexandria and Cairo exceeded 1m people. When the city rush is done, Africa
 may have 80 cities with more than 1m people, plus a cluster of megacities
 headed by Kinshasa, Lagos and Cairo—none of which show signs of mass
 starvation. Intermediary towns of 50,000-100,000 people will soak up most
 of those coming from the countryside. Urbanisation is part of the solution
 to Africa’s demographic problems, not a manifestation of them.
 
 
 Indeed, it is an open question whether demography should really be
 considered an African problem—or one of its advantages. Over the past year,
 the continent has had the fastest economic growth per person in the world,
 partly because it has been somewhat less affected by the collapse of world
 trade, but partly because of the small increases countries are seeing in
 the number of people of working age.
 
 
 The UN Population Division points out that Africa’s overall population is
 8% lower today than it would have been if its fertility rate had stayed at
 its 1970s level. And the trend towards lower fertility is likely to
 accelerate. The use of modern contraceptives in sub-Saharan Africa is only
 12% (though it has doubled since 1994). In Somalia it is 1%. By comparison,
 the rate in Asia and Latin America is over 40%, so contraceptive use is
 likely to rise sharply.
 
 
 Demography needs to be put in perspective. It is not destiny. Africa needs
 a green revolution; more efficient cities; more female education; honest
 governments; better economic policies. Without those things, Africa will
 not reap its demographic dividend. But without the transition that Africa
 has started upon, the continent’s chances of achieving those good things
 would be even lower than they are. Demography is a start.
 
 
 
 
 
 * Realizing the Demographic dividend: is Africa any different? By David E.
 Bloom and others.
 

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