In 1957, when Ghana became the first African country to win its independence, there were 6.05m Ghanaians and some 200m people living in sub-Saharan Africa. Today Ghana’s population has more than quadrupled to 29m and sub-Saharan Africa’s has nearly quintupled to 1bn. This is just the start. Africa is on the verge of an unprecedented population explosion.
If you asked people to identify the most important trends shaping the world, many would name climate change, the rise of China, the potential of artificial intelligence or the surge of nationalism. Few would mention the dramatic increase of the population in a continent that to many is an afterthought.
That view will become harder to sustain. Populations in Europe and the Americas have stopped growing. The population of Asia will peak at around 5bn by 2050. For the next century, most of the increase in the world’s population will happen in Africa.