Reframing Population

Discussion on Africa’s demography and population growth has often been handicapped by narrow and fragmented framing. But what if we reframed these discussions?

Written by Yarri Kamara

Aug 17, 2022

A decade ago, I supported a team of demographers studying whether African countries could benefit from the demographic dividend, that sweet spot when a country’s working age population outnumbers its dependent population of children and elderly, making economic growth easier to achieve. My task was to review policy plans regarding things like health facilities, education and urban amenities. The majority of targets for supplying crucial services in the plans I read were outstripped by the projected number of children and adults in coming years. Planned schools were not keeping up with the number of expected school-age children. The planned capacity of power plants was not in line with rising urban populations. Planning, let alone turning those plans into reality, is difficult when populations are growing fast. This I appreciate.

What I appreciate less is how debates about the need to limit population growth in Africa are framed. Fred Pearce, author of The Coming Population Crash, points out that population issues are among the most toxic headline grabbers. Over history there certainly has been an unhelpful dose of toxicity, explicit or hidden, in the Western regard of non-Western population growth. In 2017, when French president Macron hectoringly opined at a G20 summit on the futility of spending on aid as long as African women were having seven or eight children, he was following in the footsteps of a long line of blunt Malthusian theorists, as well as getting the data wrong. African women in 2017 on average had 4.8 children, and in some countries the rate was as low as 1.4 children.

Discussion on demography has often been handicapped by narrow and fragmented framing. But what if we reframed population discourses, by widening and shifting the frame? The widening of the frame on African population growth, to consider history, power relations and context, is essential especially for outsiders interested in true dialogue on Africa’s demography. A wider frame is necessary to avoid illogical or suspicious conclusions that elicit knee-jerk defensiveness or fall on deaf ears. At this point in history with couples in a record number of countries having fewer children than needed to keep national populations constant, it is also interesting for Africans to shift the frame. To shift and ask: what lies on the other side? What potential civilizational problems await us when population control is achieved?

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About the Author

Yarri Kamara

is a policy researcher and writer based in Burkina Faso.

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Reframing Population