Sheet n°282 - December 2007
Sub-Saharan Africa : the population emergency
he population of
Sub-Saharan Africa
is continuing to grow
at twice the rate recorded in Latin America
and Asia. This exceptional population growth
is a major handicap
for efforts to achieve
the UN’s Millennium
Development Objectives
(MDO) (1) in most of the
countries lying South
of the Sahara. With the
aim of assessing the
significance of relations
between
population
trends and development
in Sub-Saharan Africa,
the Agence Française
de
Développement
(AFD ) commissioned
the Centre Population
e t Développement
(CEPED) (2) to undertake a wide-ranging
survey and produce a
review of the demographic situation and dynamics in this vast region.
Demographers from the
IRD, academics and
partners from countries
of the South (3) contributed to this work.
Their results, recently
published, showed that
only combined actions,
embracing such aspects
as education, health and
family planning, would
provide the possibility
of eventual achievement of the Millennium
Development Objectives
set by the United
Nations.
©IRD /Jean-Pierre Guengant
T
In most countries of Sub-Saharan Africa, fecundity reaches five children per woman or even more.
Sub-Saharan Africa has been experiencing phenomenal population
growth since the beginning of the
XXth Century, following several centuries of population stagnation attributable
to the slave trade and colonization. The
region’s population in fact increased
from 100 million in 1900 to 770 million
in 2005. The latest United Nations
projections, published in March 2007,
envisaged a figure of 1.5 to 2 billion
inhabitants being reached between the
present and 2050.
The report of a demographic study,
coordinated by the Centre Population
et Développement (CEPED), commissioned by the Agence Française de
Développement (AFD), was published
recently. The work was performed by
a joint team involving scientists from
the IRD and specialist academics from
Belgium, Cameroon, France and the
Ivory Coast. They examined the recent
and projected future population trends
in Sub-Saharan Africa and the relationships between these tendencies
and the development of the region.
This review effectively demolished
some generally accepted ideas, in particular the one that Sub-Saharan Africa
is underpopulated.
Today, two out of three inhabitants of
this large region of Africa are under
25 years of age (twice the number
prevailing in Europe) and, with 32 inhabitants per km2, Sub-Saharan Africa is
more densely populated on average
than Latin America (28 inhabitants/
km2). And although two-thirds of its
population still live in rural areas, massive migration to the towns and cities is
under way. Thus, whereas in 1960, just
one city, Johannesburg, had a population of over one million, Africa now has
Institut de recherche pour le développement - 213, rue La Fayette - F-75480 Paris cedex 10 - France - www.ird.fr
Retrouvez les photos de l'IRD concernant cette fiche, libres de droit pour la presse, sur www.ird.fr/indigo
>>
Sheet n°282 - Dcember 2007
For further information
CONTACTS :
Jean-Pierre GUENGANT
Director of research and
IRD representative in
Burkina Faso
Unité de recherche
Migration, mobilités,
dynamique du peuplement et des territoires
Address :
IRD Burkina Faso
01 BP 182
01 Ouagadougou
Burkina Faso
Tel : + (226) 50 30 67 37
Fax : + (226) 50 31 03 85
Email : direction@ird.bf
Benoît FERRY
Director of research with
IRD, scientific coordinator
of CEPED
Laboratoire PopulationEnvironnementDéveloppement (LPED)
Email : b.ferry@tiscali.fr
PRESS OFFICE :
Gaëlle COURCOUX
+33 (0)1 48 03 75 19
presse@ird.fr
INDIGO, IRD PHOTO
LIBRARY :
Daina RECHNER
+33 (0)1 48 03 78 99
indigo@ird.fr
www.ird.fr/indigo
REFERENCE :
L’Afrique face à ses
défis démographiques
– Un avenir incertain
Chief editor : Benoît Ferry
Co-edition AFD – CEPED
– KARTHALA, 2007,
379 p.
KEY WORDS :
Demography, Africa,
development policy
about 40 of them. At the present rate of
rural exodus, half Sub-Saharan Africa’s
population would be urban dwellers by
2030. This transition should be met by
huge investments in construction of new
infrastructures, wastewater drainage
and treatment and refuse reprocessing
in the great agglomerations, whose
management threatens to become more
and more problematic. Intra-regional
migration, another safety valve for relieving the ongoing densification of the
rural sphere, is severely disrupted by
the conflicts and crises affecting several host countries. The possibilities for
emigration to industrialized countries
are increasingly subject to control and
are more difficult, particularly for the
migration candidates with few qualifications. Moreover, the risks of population
decrease linked to Aids appear to be
receding. This factor stems especially
from more effective prevention campaigns and improved access to health
care. The latest UNAIDS assessments
made using more reliable data brought
the proportion of the African population
infected by HIV to a lower figure, now
put at about 5%. No country should
therefore see its population decrease
owing simply to the Aids epidemic.
A parallel factor at work is fecundity,
equal to or higher than 5 children per
woman. This is two to three times higher
as in the rest of the world, an important
factor being that four out of five African
women live in countries where there is
little access to contraception. Indeed
less than 20% of women use modern
contraceptive methods, as against 60%
or more in Latin America and Asia.
The fact that the use of contraception
is progressing very slowly contributes to the strong population growth.
Yet the control by women and couples over their fecundity remains the
essential lever by which Sub-Saharan
Africa might achieve its demographic
transition. However, campaigns promoting the balanced family such as
those successfully run in other developing countries (Bangladesh, Jamaica
for instance) have never really been
implemented in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Thus, whereas the overall demographic
trend points towards a stabilization
of world population, that of Africa is
continuing on a substantial rise. SubSaharan Africa remains the world’s
least advanced region in terms of the
move towards demographic transition.
The area is also behind in the development process. In 2004 for example,
only six countries out of 48 obtained
a growth rate equal to or greater than
7%, the threshold considered essential
for achieving the first MDO–in other
words the halving of poverty between
now and 2015.
The prime effect of this exceptional,
continuing population growth in SubSaharan Africa is its role as a major
handicap to economic and social development of most of the region’s countries. The conclusion from the research
is that if the African nations want to
take up the double challenge of their
demographic transition and reduction
of their poverty, development policies must be completely rethought. It
is by the adoption and implementation of policies hinged on combined
actions–involving education, prevention
of mortality, equitable access to health
care and to family planning–that changes bringing advances and improved
living standards could be generated
in Sub-Saharan Africa. This perspective makes it imperative to place the
population question, one of the crucial issues for the future of most of
the countries concerned, at the core
of their development policies.
Grégory Fléchet - DIC
Translation : Nicholas Flay
(1) T h e M i l l e n n i u m D e v e l o p m e n t
Objectives by the United Nations set in
2000 range from the halving of extreme
poverty to primary education for all, by way
of a halt to the spread of HIV/Aids by 2015.
(2) The CEPED is about to become a
mixed research unit bringing together
researchers from the French Institut
national d’études démographiques (INED),
the IRD and the Université Paris Descartes.
(3) These studies were conducted jointly
with scientists from the Catholic University of
Louvain (Belgium), the Institut de formation
et de recherche démographique (IFORD) of
Yaoundé (Cameroon), the Ecole nationale
supérieure de statistique et d’économie
appliquée (ENSEA) in Abidjan (Ivory Coast
and Université Paris X Nanterre (France).
Grégory Fléchet, coordinator
Délégation à l’information et à la communication
Tél. : +33(0)1 48 03 76 07 - fax : +33(0)1 40 36 24 55 - fichesactu@ird.fr