Explosive Population Growth in Tropical Africa: Crucial Omission in Development Forecasts—Emerging Risks and Way Out

Abstract

Our article draws attention to a crucial factor frequently omitted from the global development agenda, namely the explosive population growth inevitably expected in Tropical Africa in the nearest decades as a result of the region's laggardness in fertility transition. Population doubling (or even tripling) in the next decades can seriously undermine the development prospects of Tropical African countries and lead to sociopolitical destabilization or even large-scale violent conflicts with possibly global consequences. Bringing down the population growth rates (mainly through substantially reducing the fertility rates) appears to be crucial for the achievement of the 1977 “Goals for Mankind,” as well as the Millennium Development Goals, and, as we proceed to show, can be most effectively achieved through substantially increasing female secondary education, which, in turn, should be achieved by introducing compulsory secondary education and making it the first-rate development priority.

KEYWORDS:

• Development fertility
• Malthusian scenarios
• population pressure
• secondary education
• Tanzania
• Tropical Africa

Notes

¹Undoubtedly, we should note here that PricewaterhouseCoopers made their forecasts using the old series on UN population forecasts, which still did not account for the large-scale fertility stall and looked much less ominous (Figure 1).

²Let us remind the reader that the introduction of compulsory secondary education invariably implies the presence of universal compulsory primary education, so the majority of Sub-Saharan countries, especially the most lagged behind ones, will have to solve these tasks simultaneously.

³Currently the system of school education in Tanzania has the following structure: 7 years of primary education (ages 7–13) are followed by 4 years of secondary ordinary (ages 14–17) and 2 years of secondary advanced (ages 18–19).

⁴As all the children that will enter this cohort in the nearest decade and a half are already born, so the growth is inevitable.

⁵Indeed, taking into account the secondary school age cohort is bound to approximately double in the next 20 years (as in 2010 the number of children aged 0–4 was almost twice as large as the 15–19 cohort, 8.0 and 4.7 mln accordingly), the scenario implying a slowed-down but still continuing growth of secondary net enrollment should be called not a pessimistic, but a medium one, as the most pessimistic scenario would imply the government completely failing to keep secondary schooling up with the rocketing number of potential pupils, which would result in a decrease in secondary net enrollment, a decrease in the proportion of female population aged 15+ with at least incomplete secondary education, and would eventually dramatically handicap the fertility decline, greatly increasing the probability of all the explosive population growth-related risks listed above.

⁶We should specify here that this algorithm tends to somewhat underestimate the decreasing effect of secondary education upon population growth in all three scenarios. Indeed, when calculating the proportion of women with a given level of education we use the UN medium values for the total number of women of the given age in a given year. However, as secondary education spreads and fertility declines, the number of children of the first generation with 100% secondary et enrollment will be substantially lower than that forecasted by the UN medium scenario; accordingly, when these children, especially girls, grow up, they will make a less numerous fertile age cohorts than the UN forecast indicates. This divergence will become more visible by the end of the forecast time diapason. However, at this stage we took this underestimation of educational effect as tolerable in order not to overcomplicate the model for the test case.

⁷Indeed, mass effect of introducing compulsory secondary schooling on fertility will become visible only after 8 to 10 years, as more women who have acquired secondary education enter their fertile ages.