Will 40% of the world's workforce really be in Africa by 2050?
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Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service. The freewheeling number detectives in the great statistical car chase of life. I'm Ruth Alexander. This week we run our slide rule over the Hollywood blockbuster Fast and Furious 6.
Ride or die. But first, is Africa on the brink of taking over the world? Loyal listener Albert Bundy from Nigeria raised a quizzical eyebrow at this claim from the US Secretary of State John Kerry.
What I see in Africa, what I see around the world, are explosive numbers of young people. And over the next 35 years, Africa will become 40% of the entire world's workforce.
John Kerry addressing the University of Addis Ababa in Ethiopia. Can he really be right to say that 40% of the world's workforce will be based in Africa by about 2050? Well, happily, we have a hotline not just to the United Nations Population Division, but to the head of its projections team, Francois Pelletier, who's just published the latest numbers on what the future looks like.
In Africa, the number of people in the main working age is from 25 to 59 years is projected to increase from 380 million to close to a billion by 2050, which represents a 2.6-fold increase. In terms of percentage, this implies a doubling of its share in the world population workforce from 12% to 23%.
So the proportion of the world's working-age people who are based in Africa will double in just 35 years or so. By 2050, a billion people on that continent will make up 23%, almost a quarter of the world's potential workforce. That is a big number. But it does fall short of John Kerry's 40%. So where did he get this number from? Well, we think he actually just misspoke. And indeed, we've discovered that just the day before he addressed the university audience, he spoke at the African Union 50th Anniversary Summit and got the number about right. He did then, though, make another interesting point using the magic 40% figure, but he was talking about something else. In the next three generations, he said, more than 40% of the entire world's youth will live in Africa.
Well, we wondered, could that be true? Again, we turn to our UN man, François Pelletier.
Currently, in the population 15 to 24, which is our definition of young people, 18% of the world's young people in that age bracket will be in Africa. that figure could reach 33% in 2050 and 45% in 2100.
So John Kerry was pretty much correct. By 2100, 45% of young people will live in Africa. Taking its population as a whole, this century, Africa's story will be one of incredible growth, beyond that of any other region in the world. It's expected to account for more than half of the total global population growth between now and 2050, which would see its 1.1 billion population of today more than double to 2.4 billion. By 2100, the population is expected to almost quadruple to more than 4 billion people. So why is the African population predicted to grow so much this century? Sarah Walters, a demographer from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, says Tamara's story is being written today.
The reason why Africa is projected to grow so much more significantly than anywhere else is because of the very high levels of current fertility and the projected trend in fertility, which even though it will decline, it will remain higher than elsewhere. So today, for example... The total fertility rates of the number of children per woman in Africa is 4.7, whereas in each of the other continents it is at replacement level. And the highest fertility rates in the world are found in Africa. So of 31 countries where fertility is over five births per woman, 29 of those are found in Africa. So even though fertility will decline over time, the legacy of the very high fertility that we have today will continue to be felt in what's happening in the future.
Demography expert Sarah Walters on Africa, one to watch.
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