How to address Africa’s demographic boom

What Africa needs to go through is just a demographic transition.

The behavior and reproductive habits of human beings change as their environment, resources and society change.

When literacy increases and medical care becomes more widespread, two things happen:

A decrease in the infant mortality rate, due to better health care (and consequently less need to have as many children).

A further decrease in the birth rate, as it inversely correlates with the average level of education of women.

A condition that in practice is in line with that of most developed countries, and which is diametrically opposed to that of the world’s poor countries, where mortality and birth rates are both very high.

It also has an impact in poorer societies to consider children as if they were resources, since less educated environments are followed by poorer societies, where the need for human labor prevails. A world not so different from that of a lot of modern countries not even a century ago.

What should be provided to poor countries to accelerate their demographic transition, as outlined above, should be better education and better healthcare (through infrastructure, dedicated material and personnel) and free contraceptives.

The results can be felt within a few generations. In Bangladesh, for example, a woman had an average of 7 children in 1960, down to 4 in 2000 and 2 in 2019.