Africa continues to evade both acronym and imagination, attracting only cliches.
Yet, it is not like any other place on earth right now.
As this excellent piece from Adam Tooze makes clear, while Asia has taken back its place (see chart) in the historic world order, the same remains elusive for Africa.
This is despite what is a more than 10x of population since 1914 (124 million to 1.34 billion today) when compared to a “mere” 3-4.5x in Asia.
But Asia is plateauing in population terms. Africa continues to grow – forecast to reach 2.4-2.5 billion by 2050 and 35-40% of the world’s estimated 9-11 billion population by 2100.
How confident are we of the former forecast? As Tooze makes clear there is one “dramatic fact” – “a large number of the mothers whose children will drive growth to 2050 have already been born“.
Demographics are nebulous – long in time and space – but sometimes two decades, like the last two we experienced, are “decisive for global population history“.
There is so much more in the article culminating in a quote from Howard French – “How Africa’s population evolves, and how the continent’s economies develop, will affect everything people near and far assume about their lives today.”
