Essential The Africa the Media Doesn't Tell You About

AB Ziggy

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Africa’s high birth rate is keeping the continent poor
Why the birth rate has been slow to fall

Print version | Middle East and Africa

Sep 22nd 2018
JOHN MAGUFULI, the president of Tanzania, has strong views about birth control. He does not see the point. In 2016 he announced that state schools would be free, and, as a result, women could throw away their contraceptives. On September 9th this year he told a rally that birth control was a sign of parental laziness. Tanzania must not follow Europe, he went on, where one “side effect” of widespread contraception is a shrinking labour force.

There seems little danger of that. Tanzania’s fertility rate is estimated to be 4.9, implying that the average woman will have that many children. Europe’s rate is 1.6. Tanzania is helping drive a continental baby boom. In 1950 sub-Saharan Africa had just 180m people—a third of Europe’s population. By 2050 it will have 2.2bn—three times as many as Europe. If UN forecasts are right, sub-Saharan Africa will have 4bn people in 2100 (see chart 1).


That is worrying, although not for the old reasons. In “An Essay on the Principle of Population”, published in 1798, Thomas Malthus claimed that the human population was bound to increase faster than the supply of food, leading to catastrophe. Although Malthus is still admired by some, the green revolution rubbished his hypothesis. The fear now is not that countries will run out of food but that a surfeit of babies will retard their development.

Mr Magufuli is right to suggest that Europe has many old people and could do with more workers to support them. But Tanzania’s many children weigh on its economy, too. Sub-Saharan Africa’s dependency ratio (the population younger than 20 and older than 64 versus the population between those ages) is 129:100, compared with 65:100 in Europe. Sub-Saharan Africa is expected to have a worse dependency ratio than Europe even in 2050.

High fertility can also be seen as a global problem, says Bill Gates, whose foundation (jointly run with his wife, Melinda) will hold a conference next week about the state of the world. Overall, humanity is becoming wealthier. But because birth rates are so high in the poorest parts of the world’s poorest countries, poverty and sickness are that much harder to eradicate. “Kids are being born exactly in the places” where it is hardest to get schooling, health and other services to them, he explains.

There is nothing inherently African about large families. Botswana’s fertility rate is 2.6, down from 6.6 in 1960. South Africa’s rate is 2.4. And although the UN has a good record of predicting global population growth, it has got fertility projections badly wrong in individual countries. Sudden baby busts in countries like Brazil, Iran and Thailand caught almost everyone out. Could Africa also spring a surprise?

The UN’s demographers project that fertility will fall in every single mainland African country over the next few decades. They just expect a much slower pace of change than Asia or Latin America managed when their families were the same size. It took Asia 20 years, from 1972 to 1992, to go from a fertility rate above five to below three. Sub-Saharan Africa is expected to complete the same journey in 41 years, ending in 2054. Its fertility rate is not expected to fall below two this century. Because many Africans marry young (see next article) the generations turn over quickly, leading to fast growth.

The reason the UN expects change to be slow in future is that it has been slow until now. After stagnating economically in the 1990s, countries like Nigeria and Tanzania grew wealthier in the 2000s. But their fertility rates hardly fell (see chart 2). Nor has urbanisation transformed family life as much as you might expect. West Africa is much more urban than east Africa, but has a higher fertility rate.

Three things could drastically change the picture, however. First, more African governments could promote family planning. Ethiopia, Malawi and Rwanda have done so, and their birth rates are dropping faster than average. Perhaps the starkest change is in Kenya. Alex Ezeh of the Centre for Global Development, a think-tank in Washington, remembers showing Kenyan politicians evidence that wealthy people both desired and had small families, whereas the poor wanted large families and ended up with even larger ones. The government invested in clinics and propaganda, to some effect. Household surveys show that 53% of married Kenyan women used effective contraception in 2014, up from 32% in 2003. Kenya’s neighbour, Tanzania, is at least a decade behind.

The second cause for optimism is education. Broadly, the more girls go to school in a country, the lower that country’s birth rate. This seems to be more than just a correlation: several studies, in Africa and elsewhere, have found that schooling actually depresses fertility. To attend school—even a lousy school where you barely learn to read—is to gain a little independence and learn about opportunities that your parents had not envisaged for you.

Researchers at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria suggest that Africa’s schools are about to drive a large change. They point out that education spending weakened in some African countries in the 1980s as governments scrambled to cut budget deficits. Girls’ schooling, which had been increasing, flattened. It is probably not a coincidence that African fertility rates fell little in the 2000s, when that thinly educated cohort reached womanhood. But school enrolments have risen since then. If education really makes for smaller families, that will soon be apparent.

The third profound change would be stability in the Sahel. The semi-arid belt that stretches through Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Niger, northern Nigeria and Sudan is lawless in parts and universally poor. Child death rates are still shockingly high in places. Partly as a result, and also because women’s power in the Sahel is undermined by widespread polygamy, people still desire many children. The most recent household survey of Niger, in 2012, found that the average woman thought nine the ideal number.

Progress on all three counts depends mostly on African politicians. It falls to them to create more and better schools, provide security for their people and invest in family planning. They, not foreign observers, need to conclude that their countries would be wealthier if they had rather fewer children. Like so much in Africa, almost everything depends on the quality of government. And that, sadly, is hard to decree.
 

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South African schools will start teaching Kiswahili to students from 2020

By Abdi Latif Dahir | September 18, 2018

RTX1LCML-e1537272926948.jpg

Swahili will be an optional language soon.

Africa’s most “internationally recognized language” will soon be taught in South African classrooms.

Starting in 2020, schools will teach Kiswahili as an optional language, making it the first African language outside South Africa to be offered in class. Education minister Angie Motshekga said the move was meant to promote unity and “social cohesion with fellow Africans.” Anti-immigrant sentiments have brewed in South Africa in the past decade, leading to sporadic attacks on the homes and businesses of communities including Malawians, Somalis, and Nigerians.

The push to embrace the Swahili language comes as African countries look into plans to reform and critically assess their education systems. There’s also the recognition that the continent needs a new strategy for mother-tongue based education from primary through to tertiary level education, and to cast aside dependence on foreign languages. This realization also arrives as African languages continue to die as governments adopt official languages while discouraging local ones, in hopes of forging a harmonized national identity.

kut6g.jpg


In a continent with more than 2,000 distinct languages, the role and importance of indigenous African languages in post-colonial modern societies has also proved to be a contentious issue. Over the last few decades, the place of African languages has suffered negative consequences due to colonization, globalization, and the entrenchment of official languages like English and French. African languages have often been labeled as a hindrance to learning, and have suffered delegitimization at social, economic, and political spheres.

More often than not, foreign languages have also displaced African languages in educational, cultural and even leadership spheres. For instance, at his farewell speech as the chairman of the African Union in 2004, Mozambique’s then-president Joaquim Chissano surprised African leaders by delivering his remarks in Kiswahili. At the time, the AU was only using English, Portuguese, Arabic, and French as its official languages—and government officials, caught unawares, scrambled to find translators. The event later pushed the continental body to introduce Kiswahili as an official language.

Since then many governments and activists have moved to call for institutions, both local and foreign, to embrace the Swahili language. In 2015, Tanzania announced it would dump English and solely stick to Kiswahili as a language of instruction. Campaigns have also been launched to get social media giants like Twitter to recognize Swahili—albeit in vain so far. Motshekga’s announcement also comes just weeks after the leader of South Africa’s Economic Freedom Fighters party Julius Malema suggested Swahili be adopted as the language of the African continent.



*Welcome to South Africa

Sign up to the Quartz Africa Weekly Brief here for news and analysis on African business, tech and innovation in your inbox

South African schools will start teaching Kiswahili to students from 2020
 

AB Ziggy

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I like this. Swahili is the only major African language spoken widespread across multiple countries. It's perfect to promote break down language and trade barriers on the continent.
 

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I agree, Swahili should be pushed as a language of international communication and business in Africa. all those other languages on that chart are only spoken by people in that ethnic group
 

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interesting related article
English rules in Uganda, but local languages shouldn't be sidelined
The language has a fraught history in Uganda. By the time European Protestant explorers arrived in Buganda in 1877, followed by Catholics in 1879, Swahili was used as a language for inter-ethnic communication, in the courts and as a language for trade in East Africa. In 1928 it was declared the official language in education and administration. This was met with stiff opposition from Buganda and bishops who sent a petition to the colonial secretary. The policy was reversed and Luganda was reinstated as the official language in the administration.

In Buganda, Swahili was said to be a language of slavery and bondage and its association with Islam made it a rival to Christianity.

In 1972 during the presidency of the dictator Idi Amin Dada, Swahili was again declared the national language of Uganda and introduced as a compulsory language on radio and television. Government employees were ordered to use Swahili, increasing its use. But the end of the regime also saw the end of the official use of Swahili.

Although the central region became hostile towards Swahili, in Northern Uganda it had a different status and image. The inhabitants of Northern Uganda, for instance, were recruited into the King’s African Rifles from 1902 through to the 1960s to serve in colonial government’s army. Joining the army was prestigious. When they returned home, they came back with a new language: Swahili.

Swahili was admired and learnt by the relatives of the army officers. It spread in the region. Even today Swahili is used in Northern Uganda as a lingua franca.

Unfortunately, despite its long history in Uganda, Swahili has failed to attain prominence as has happened in other East African countries.
 

AB Ziggy

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I agree, Swahili should be pushed as a language of international communication and business in Africa. all those other languages on that chart are only spoken by people in that ethnic group

I would also say Hausa is a decent candidate for West Africa since it's a widespread trade language many Muslim tribes all over the region use to communicate with each other.
 

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I would also say Hausa is a decent candidate for West Africa since it's a widespread trade language many Muslim tribes all over the region use to communicate with each other.
West Africa's linggua franca is English and French

Hausa isn't even spoken by the majority in Nigeria and not everyone is Muslim (or even the majority)
 

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Liberians Petition International Community to Freeze Support to Liberia amid Troubling ‘Corruption’

By Admin On Sep 25, 2018

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Monrovia – Heavy downpour of rain could not deter scores of Liberians, who gathered Monday, September 24, in Monrovia to petition five major diplomatic missions in the country to pressure the administration of President George Weah to account for L$16 billion that is reported missing.

Report by Alpha Daffae Senkpeni, daffae.senkpeni@frontpageafricaonline.com


The protesters said, “It is sad that the government has been dishonest and inconsistent in releasing the facts” about the ongoing investigation into the missing money.

By the morning of Monday, hundreds of protesters had gathered at various points across Monrovia. The protest, which was mostly peaceful, saw many businesses shut and schools closed.

The protesters, under the banner Coalition of Citizens United to Bring Our Money Back (COCUBOMB), called on the United States, the European Union, United Nations, African Union and ECOWAS to take several actions in order to safe Liberia including freezing support to the government.

“We call on you and all international partners of Liberia to launch an immediate independent international forensic investigation into this missing L$16 billion saga which has both economic, social and security implications. The nation remains terrified by this mystery,” the protesters said in their petition.

At the same time, the protesters want the “international community prevails upon the Weah-led administration to immediately release the internal investigative report of the Central Bank of Liberia that former President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf referenced in her latest interview on BCC.” They claimed the report could “unravel” hidden details of the ongoing investigation.

Monday protest claimed the attention of the international community as President Weah, who is in the United States, prepares to address the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday, September 26.

While the Liberian leader will be looking to attract the world’s attention to his country’s development challenges, he will also have to dedicate some of his time to the unfolding situation back home.

The protesters called on Liberia’s major international partners, especially three, that have massively supported the country’s development agenda to halt all supports.

“We call on you to withhold all direct supports (in terms of financial and non-financial aid) to our government until it can fully account and restitute this stolen L$16 billion. All those linked in this horrific economic plunder and mass looting against the State and its people must be prosecuted and made to fully restitute such amount,” stated the petition.

The group made several requests to the international community including:

* That the EU and other international partners launch an immediate independent forensic investigation into the saga

* The EU, US and UN to withhold all other financial and non-financial aide to the government until it fully accounts for the missing money

* That all those linked to the ‘mass looting’ should be prosecuted and made to fully account for ‘their mayhem’

* Request the international community to conduct an audit of all the government’s financial dealings so far under President Weah and former President Sirleaf

* Public officials of the NPA, MoFDP, CBL, MICAT and RIA that are directly link to the missing billions should recuse themselves from their jobs and be subjected to investigation by an international independent investigation panel

Concern Over US$25 Million, New Properties

At the same time, the protesters are calling on the international partners to audit all financial transactions of the Weah-led administration and his predecessor, while referencing a recent US$25 million the government infused into the economy to mop up excess Liberian dollars on the market.

There have been series of concerns regarding the source of the money and how the government infused it into the economy.

A local research group claims although the government announced that some monies were infused into the economy, there has been no proper accounting.

The Center for Research and Policy Action, in a press release, called on the Legislature to investigate to situation.

COCUBOMB is also alarming over the “giant-sized private properties” being built or bought by President Weah and some high-profile officials, adding, “such investigation could also dig out some hard truths about this missing L$16 billion.”

Added the petitioners: “We call on you to prevail upon the Weah-led administration to ensure full asset declaration by all public officials especially the President either before or during the course of the Independent International Forensic Investigation”.
 

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East, West Africa lead continent's fertilizer uptake push

SEPTEMBER 25, 2018 / 9:47 AM
Wendell Roelf

CAPE TOWN (Reuters) - Africa’s annual fertilizer consumption is expected to reach 13.6 million metric tonnes of nutrient by 2030 from 7.6 mmt now, with East and West Africa fast growth areas as farmers look to boost crop yields, industry analysts CRU said on Tuesday.

r

A farmer plows the field in Saulawa village, on the outskirts of Nigeria's north-central state of Kaduna, file. REUTERS/Joe Brock

The world’s poorest continent, which has vast tracts of uncultivated land and where most of the population are subsistence farmers, has traditionally lagged behind other regions when it comes to fertilizer use.

According to the African Development Bank, fertilizer consumption across Africa has marginally increased since 2010 from 25 to 27 kg per hectare of arable land, and from 12.4 to 14.9 kg per hectare for low-income African countries, less than one-twentieth of Asian and Latin American countries.

“Fertilizer consumption in Eastern and Western Africa is likely to increase three to four-fold in the next 10 to 15 years,” said Peter Heffernan, head of global fertilizers and chemicals at CRU analysts.

Consumption in West Africa is forecast to more than double, rising to 4.6 mmt by 2030 from 1.9 mmt now, he said.

“These two regions are the fastest growing fertilizer consumption hotspots in the world at the moment,” he told Reuters on the sidelines of an African fertilizer conference in Cape Town.

Africa’s richest man Aliko Dangote is developing a 1.5 million tonne fertiliser plant in Nigeria’s commercial hub of Lagos, which he expects to commission by the end of the year.

Singapore-owned Indorama Eleme Petrochemicals Ltd is seeking to double its Nigerian plant annual output of urea fertiliser to 2.8 million tonnes, and plans to list in Lagos next year.

Other firms looking to the continent to expand their operations are Yara and Saudi Arabia’s Ma’aden.

“Previously when there was an apprehension by most smallholder farmers to apply fertilizer thinking it will damage their soil, that apprehension is no longer there,” said Ashish Lakhotia, chief executive of ETG Inputs.

East, West Africa lead continent's fertilizer uptake push
 

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Africa’s high birth rate is keeping the continent poor
Why the birth rate has been slow to fall

Print version | Middle East and Africa

Sep 22nd 2018
JOHN MAGUFULI, the president of Tanzania, has strong views about birth control. He does not see the point. In 2016 he announced that state schools would be free, and, as a result, women could throw away their contraceptives. On September 9th this year he told a rally that birth control was a sign of parental laziness. Tanzania must not follow Europe, he went on, where one “side effect” of widespread contraception is a shrinking labour force.

There seems little danger of that. Tanzania’s fertility rate is estimated to be 4.9, implying that the average woman will have that many children. Europe’s rate is 1.6. Tanzania is helping drive a continental baby boom. In 1950 sub-Saharan Africa had just 180m people—a third of Europe’s population. By 2050 it will have 2.2bn—three times as many as Europe. If UN forecasts are right, sub-Saharan Africa will have 4bn people in 2100 (see chart 1).


That is worrying, although not for the old reasons. In “An Essay on the Principle of Population”, published in 1798, Thomas Malthus claimed that the human population was bound to increase faster than the supply of food, leading to catastrophe. Although Malthus is still admired by some, the green revolution rubbished his hypothesis. The fear now is not that countries will run out of food but that a surfeit of babies will retard their development.

Mr Magufuli is right to suggest that Europe has many old people and could do with more workers to support them. But Tanzania’s many children weigh on its economy, too. Sub-Saharan Africa’s dependency ratio (the population younger than 20 and older than 64 versus the population between those ages) is 129:100, compared with 65:100 in Europe. Sub-Saharan Africa is expected to have a worse dependency ratio than Europe even in 2050.

High fertility can also be seen as a global problem, says Bill Gates, whose foundation (jointly run with his wife, Melinda) will hold a conference next week about the state of the world. Overall, humanity is becoming wealthier. But because birth rates are so high in the poorest parts of the world’s poorest countries, poverty and sickness are that much harder to eradicate. “Kids are being born exactly in the places” where it is hardest to get schooling, health and other services to them, he explains.

There is nothing inherently African about large families. Botswana’s fertility rate is 2.6, down from 6.6 in 1960. South Africa’s rate is 2.4. And although the UN has a good record of predicting global population growth, it has got fertility projections badly wrong in individual countries. Sudden baby busts in countries like Brazil, Iran and Thailand caught almost everyone out. Could Africa also spring a surprise?

The UN’s demographers project that fertility will fall in every single mainland African country over the next few decades. They just expect a much slower pace of change than Asia or Latin America managed when their families were the same size. It took Asia 20 years, from 1972 to 1992, to go from a fertility rate above five to below three. Sub-Saharan Africa is expected to complete the same journey in 41 years, ending in 2054. Its fertility rate is not expected to fall below two this century. Because many Africans marry young (see next article) the generations turn over quickly, leading to fast growth.

The reason the UN expects change to be slow in future is that it has been slow until now. After stagnating economically in the 1990s, countries like Nigeria and Tanzania grew wealthier in the 2000s. But their fertility rates hardly fell (see chart 2). Nor has urbanisation transformed family life as much as you might expect. West Africa is much more urban than east Africa, but has a higher fertility rate.

Three things could drastically change the picture, however. First, more African governments could promote family planning. Ethiopia, Malawi and Rwanda have done so, and their birth rates are dropping faster than average. Perhaps the starkest change is in Kenya. Alex Ezeh of the Centre for Global Development, a think-tank in Washington, remembers showing Kenyan politicians evidence that wealthy people both desired and had small families, whereas the poor wanted large families and ended up with even larger ones. The government invested in clinics and propaganda, to some effect. Household surveys show that 53% of married Kenyan women used effective contraception in 2014, up from 32% in 2003. Kenya’s neighbour, Tanzania, is at least a decade behind.

The second cause for optimism is education. Broadly, the more girls go to school in a country, the lower that country’s birth rate. This seems to be more than just a correlation: several studies, in Africa and elsewhere, have found that schooling actually depresses fertility. To attend school—even a lousy school where you barely learn to read—is to gain a little independence and learn about opportunities that your parents had not envisaged for you.

Researchers at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria suggest that Africa’s schools are about to drive a large change. They point out that education spending weakened in some African countries in the 1980s as governments scrambled to cut budget deficits. Girls’ schooling, which had been increasing, flattened. It is probably not a coincidence that African fertility rates fell little in the 2000s, when that thinly educated cohort reached womanhood. But school enrolments have risen since then. If education really makes for smaller families, that will soon be apparent.

The third profound change would be stability in the Sahel. The semi-arid belt that stretches through Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Niger, northern Nigeria and Sudan is lawless in parts and universally poor. Child death rates are still shockingly high in places. Partly as a result, and also because women’s power in the Sahel is undermined by widespread polygamy, people still desire many children. The most recent household survey of Niger, in 2012, found that the average woman thought nine the ideal number.

Progress on all three counts depends mostly on African politicians. It falls to them to create more and better schools, provide security for their people and invest in family planning. They, not foreign observers, need to conclude that their countries would be wealthier if they had rather fewer children. Like so much in Africa, almost everything depends on the quality of government. And that, sadly, is hard to decree.
This is far from true. Africa having these kids at massive rate because they are poor
 

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Man, today marked a week since I’ve been to Africa for the first time & that shyt was life changing!

You know that feeling when you’re in a city & you feel like it’s about to blow up and be HUGE?! That’s Kenya. They got something beautiful bubbling but the govt is definitely holding them back :pacspit:.

Rwanda is on the come up too and the women:whew:.

I wish there was a way for more brothas & sistas from the states to get to Tanzania cuz it’s over run by euro cacs:scusthov:.
 

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Africa’s high birth rate is keeping the continent poor
Why the birth rate has been slow to fall

Print version | Middle East and Africa

Sep 22nd 2018
JOHN MAGUFULI, the president of Tanzania, has strong views about birth control. He does not see the point. In 2016 he announced that state schools would be free, and, as a result, women could throw away their contraceptives. On September 9th this year he told a rally that birth control was a sign of parental laziness. Tanzania must not follow Europe, he went on, where one “side effect” of widespread contraception is a shrinking labour force.

There seems little danger of that. Tanzania’s fertility rate is estimated to be 4.9, implying that the average woman will have that many children. Europe’s rate is 1.6. Tanzania is helping drive a continental baby boom. In 1950 sub-Saharan Africa had just 180m people—a third of Europe’s population. By 2050 it will have 2.2bn—three times as many as Europe. If UN forecasts are right, sub-Saharan Africa will have 4bn people in 2100 (see chart 1).


That is worrying, although not for the old reasons. In “An Essay on the Principle of Population”, published in 1798, Thomas Malthus claimed that the human population was bound to increase faster than the supply of food, leading to catastrophe. Although Malthus is still admired by some, the green revolution rubbished his hypothesis. The fear now is not that countries will run out of food but that a surfeit of babies will retard their development.

Mr Magufuli is right to suggest that Europe has many old people and could do with more workers to support them. But Tanzania’s many children weigh on its economy, too. Sub-Saharan Africa’s dependency ratio (the population younger than 20 and older than 64 versus the population between those ages) is 129:100, compared with 65:100 in Europe. Sub-Saharan Africa is expected to have a worse dependency ratio than Europe even in 2050.

High fertility can also be seen as a global problem, says Bill Gates, whose foundation (jointly run with his wife, Melinda) will hold a conference next week about the state of the world. Overall, humanity is becoming wealthier. But because birth rates are so high in the poorest parts of the world’s poorest countries, poverty and sickness are that much harder to eradicate. “Kids are being born exactly in the places” where it is hardest to get schooling, health and other services to them, he explains.

There is nothing inherently African about large families. Botswana’s fertility rate is 2.6, down from 6.6 in 1960. South Africa’s rate is 2.4. And although the UN has a good record of predicting global population growth, it has got fertility projections badly wrong in individual countries. Sudden baby busts in countries like Brazil, Iran and Thailand caught almost everyone out. Could Africa also spring a surprise?

The UN’s demographers project that fertility will fall in every single mainland African country over the next few decades. They just expect a much slower pace of change than Asia or Latin America managed when their families were the same size. It took Asia 20 years, from 1972 to 1992, to go from a fertility rate above five to below three. Sub-Saharan Africa is expected to complete the same journey in 41 years, ending in 2054. Its fertility rate is not expected to fall below two this century. Because many Africans marry young (see next article) the generations turn over quickly, leading to fast growth.

The reason the UN expects change to be slow in future is that it has been slow until now. After stagnating economically in the 1990s, countries like Nigeria and Tanzania grew wealthier in the 2000s. But their fertility rates hardly fell (see chart 2). Nor has urbanisation transformed family life as much as you might expect. West Africa is much more urban than east Africa, but has a higher fertility rate.

Three things could drastically change the picture, however. First, more African governments could promote family planning. Ethiopia, Malawi and Rwanda have done so, and their birth rates are dropping faster than average. Perhaps the starkest change is in Kenya. Alex Ezeh of the Centre for Global Development, a think-tank in Washington, remembers showing Kenyan politicians evidence that wealthy people both desired and had small families, whereas the poor wanted large families and ended up with even larger ones. The government invested in clinics and propaganda, to some effect. Household surveys show that 53% of married Kenyan women used effective contraception in 2014, up from 32% in 2003. Kenya’s neighbour, Tanzania, is at least a decade behind.

The second cause for optimism is education. Broadly, the more girls go to school in a country, the lower that country’s birth rate. This seems to be more than just a correlation: several studies, in Africa and elsewhere, have found that schooling actually depresses fertility. To attend school—even a lousy school where you barely learn to read—is to gain a little independence and learn about opportunities that your parents had not envisaged for you.

Researchers at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria suggest that Africa’s schools are about to drive a large change. They point out that education spending weakened in some African countries in the 1980s as governments scrambled to cut budget deficits. Girls’ schooling, which had been increasing, flattened. It is probably not a coincidence that African fertility rates fell little in the 2000s, when that thinly educated cohort reached womanhood. But school enrolments have risen since then. If education really makes for smaller families, that will soon be apparent.

The third profound change would be stability in the Sahel. The semi-arid belt that stretches through Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Niger, northern Nigeria and Sudan is lawless in parts and universally poor. Child death rates are still shockingly high in places. Partly as a result, and also because women’s power in the Sahel is undermined by widespread polygamy, people still desire many children. The most recent household survey of Niger, in 2012, found that the average woman thought nine the ideal number.

Progress on all three counts depends mostly on African politicians. It falls to them to create more and better schools, provide security for their people and invest in family planning. They, not foreign observers, need to conclude that their countries would be wealthier if they had rather fewer children. Like so much in Africa, almost everything depends on the quality of government. And that, sadly, is hard to decree.


the west always writing this shyt... "Something" is keeping the continent poor but it ain't a high birth rate
 

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Africa’s high birth rate is keeping the continent poor

High fertility can also be seen as a global problem, says Bill Gates, whose foundation (jointly run with his wife, Melinda) will hold a conference next week about the state of the world. Overall, humanity is becoming wealthier. But because birth rates are so high in the poorest parts of the world’s poorest countries, poverty and sickness are that much harder to eradicate. “Kids are being born exactly in the places” where it is hardest to get schooling, health and other services to them, he explains.

There is nothing inherently African about large families. Botswana’s fertility rate is 2.6, down from 6.6 in 1960. South Africa’s rate is 2.4. And although the UN has a good record of predicting global population growth, it has got fertility projections badly wrong in individual countries. Sudden baby busts in countries like Brazil, Iran and Thailand caught almost everyone out. Could Africa also spring a surprise?

The UN’s demographers project that fertility will fall in every single mainland African country over the next few decades. They just expect a much slower pace of change than Asia or Latin America managed when their families were the same size. It took Asia 20 years, from 1972 to 1992, to go from a fertility rate above five to below three. Sub-Saharan Africa is expected to complete the same journey in 41 years, ending in 2054. Its fertility rate is not expected to fall below two this century. Because many Africans marry young (see next article) the generations turn over quickly, leading to fast growth.

The reason the UN expects change to be slow in future is that it has been slow until now. After stagnating economically in the 1990s, countries like Nigeria and Tanzania grew wealthier in the 2000s. But their fertility rates hardly fell (see chart 2). Nor has urbanisation transformed family life as much as you might expect. West Africa is much more urban than east Africa, but has a higher fertility rate.

Three things could drastically change the picture, however. First, more African governments could promote family planning. Ethiopia, Malawi and Rwanda have done so, and their birth rates are dropping faster than average. Perhaps the starkest change is in Kenya. Alex Ezeh of the Centre for Global Development, a think-tank in Washington, remembers showing Kenyan politicians evidence that wealthy people both desired and had small families, whereas the poor wanted large families and ended up with even larger ones. The government invested in clinics and propaganda, to some effect. Household surveys show that 53% of married Kenyan women used effective contraception in 2014, up from 32% in 2003. Kenya’s neighbour, Tanzania, is at least a decade behind.

The second cause for optimism is education. Broadly, the more girls go to school in a country, the lower that country’s birth rate. This seems to be more than just a correlation: several studies, in Africa and elsewhere, have found that schooling actually depresses fertility. To attend school—even a lousy school where you barely learn to read—is to gain a little independence and learn about opportunities that your parents had not envisaged for you.

Researchers at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria suggest that Africa’s schools are about to drive a large change. They point out that education spending weakened in some African countries in the 1980s as governments scrambled to cut budget deficits. Girls’ schooling, which had been increasing, flattened. It is probably not a coincidence that African fertility rates fell little in the 2000s, when that thinly educated cohort reached womanhood. But school enrolments have risen since then. If education really makes for smaller families, that will soon be apparent.

The third profound change would be stability in the Sahel. The semi-arid belt that stretches through Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Niger, northern Nigeria and Sudan is lawless in parts and universally poor. Child death rates are still shockingly high in places. Partly as a result, and also because women’s power in the Sahel is undermined by widespread polygamy, people still desire many children. The most recent household survey of Niger, in 2012, found that the average woman thought nine the ideal number.

Progress on all three counts depends mostly on African politicians. It falls to them to create more and better schools, provide security for their people and invest in family planning. They, not foreign observers, need to conclude that their countries would be wealthier if they had rather fewer children. Like so much in Africa, almost everything depends on the quality of government. And that, sadly, is hard to decree.

Sound like western propaganda. Bill gates been promoting this nonsense in Haiti with his friends the Clintons. Hillary friends got caught doing force sterilization on women in Haiti during the last 7 years after the 2010 earthquake

Also two of those people heavily pushed GMOs
 
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