Zambia’s particular challenges exemplify common problems across the continent.
The African reality
Africa has enjoyed an unprecedented (at least by the postcolonial record) economic growth period over the past 20 years. Since 1995, annual GDP growth across the sub-Saharan region has averaged 4.3 per cent a year, three percentage points higher than in the previous two decades.6 As a result, (real) income levels have been lifted substantially, from $726 per capita in 1994, for example, to $984 in 2005.7
Such growth rates, however, have not been universal across the continent. In eight countries, income per person actually fell – starkly so in the case of Zimbabwe, by some 30 per cent. Moreover, growth has not been as pro-poor as in other regions. Whereas elsewhere in the world there has been a reduction of 2 per cent in poverty for each percentage point increase in average per capita consumption, in Africa such growth has caused a reduction of just 0.69 per cent.8 In part, this is down to the source of Africa’s growth, which is primarily the extractive (oil, gas, mining) sector, rather than agriculture or manufacturing.
This record reflects great disparities in accessing finance, education, healthcare and other basic services, and where formal employment prospects also vary greatly, including between rural and urban settings. And, in part, this slow reduction in poverty levels relates to a lack of appropriate skills and the presence of the system necessary to instil them. Whereas sub-Saharan Africa’s primary-school education enrolment rates have improved in the region from under 60 per cent to 100 per cent since 1970, the rates of completion and mastery remain problematic, at just over 60 per cent compared to the global average of over 90 per cent. A high level of illiteracy results in widespread marginalisation from productive economic and social life, and is associated with poorer health and nutrition. While the official unemployment rate for the whole of sub-Saharan Africa is, at 8 per cent, only slightly above the global average of 6 per cent,9 underemployment is much higher. Many of those denoted as having work are self-employed or in poorly-paying jobs. Africans are working to survive, but, by and large, they are poor.10
Moreover, the good times are now over because of the commodity-price slump and uncertainty in the world market. Growth in 2016 across sub-Saharan Africa was projected to be 1.4 per cent – less than half of the 3.5 per cent in 2015 and far below the growth trend over the previous two decades.11
Before the commodity collapse, observers had commonly exclaimed Africa as ‘on the march’ or, in contemporary parlance, ‘rising’.12 Not surprisingly, given the fog of despair that has frequently enveloped the continent, a small industry quickly developed around the better prospects for Africa, based sometimes on a combination of hubris, faith and anecdotal data. For example, The Economist has noted that ‘Africa’s 1.2 billion people … hold plenty of promise. They are young: south of the Sahara, their median age is below 25 everywhere except in South Africa. They are better educated than ever before: literacy rates among the young now exceed 70 per cent everywhere other than in a band of desert countries across the Sahara.’ This, according to the article, is the continent exemplified by ‘Nairobi’s thriving malls and Abidjan’s humming ports’, as well as less conflict and improved healthcare.13
Africa’s level of poverty has been falling (from 61 per cent in 1994 to 43 per cent 20 years later).14 Nevertheless, Africa houses about half the world’s extreme poor, and the bulk of the world’s fragile states, where reform and recovery are tenuous. It has a long way to claw back on the lost decades of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s when development in East Asia, to take a regional example, surged. As the World Bank estimated for Africa back in 2000, ‘With the region’s rapidly growing population, five per cent annual growth was needed simply to keep the number of poor from rising. Halving severe poverty by 2015 would’, it noted, ‘require annual growth of more than seven per cent, along with a more equitable distribution of income.’15
Even before the commodity collapse, there had not been a substantial transformation of the income structure in the vast majority of countries on the continent. As The Economist has argued:16 ‘Some 90 per cent of Africans still fall below the threshold of $10 a day,’ while ‘the proportion in the $10–$20 middle class (excluding very atypical South Africa), rose from 4.4 per cent to only 6.2 per cent between 2004 and 2014’. Moreover, ‘over the same decade, the proportion defined as “upper middle” ($20–$50 a day) went from … 1.4 per cent to 2.3 per cent.’ It notes that there may be ‘only 15 million middle class households in 11 of sub-Saharan Africa’s bigger economies (excluding South Africa and using a range of $15–$115 a day)’.
Africa’s improved economic growth in this century was a significant achievement. However, more will have to be done for a sustained period in the future, especially as the commodity boom of the early part of the century is unlikely to be repeated.17 The stakes will become even higher when the huge surge of population growth hits countries across Africa.
People: The fundamental challenge for Africa
This book asks the most fundamental question for Africa and for those concerned about significantly reducing world poverty. Can Africa follow East Asia and significantly reduce the number of people living on low incomes and reap the related gains in infant mortality, child and maternal health, education and well-being that other nations, once thought to be hopeless, have achieved in recent years? In particular, in light of the enormous increase in populations that will occur across the continent, will enough jobs be generated to employ the resulting massive number of young people?
We believe that these questions must be answered now in order to prepare economies for the coming demographic reality. Waiting until populations have substantially increased will mean that leaders will only be able to offer measures that come too late for their unemployed citizens. Africa’s total population is expected to more than double by 2050 to 2.4 billion. According to the UN, Africa is expected to account for more than half of the world’s population growth between 2015 and 2050. Nearly all of this growth will be among the 49 countries of sub-Saharan Africa, comprising 2 billion of this figure. This book is mainly focused on this demographic phenomenon.18 Even the rapid expansion of Asia’s population pales in comparison: that continent will have grown by a factor of 3.7 between 1950 and 2050, whereas Africa’s equivalent factor is predicted to be 5.18 from 2000 to 2100.19
The Swedish statistician Hans Rosling has noted that, ‘[t]he reason the population is growing in Africa is the same reason that [saw] population growth first in Europe, then in the Americas, then in Asia. It’s when the population goes from a phase where you have many children born and many who are dying. Then the death rate goes down and [some time later] the birth rate follows.’20
Figure 1: UN medium variant population predictions, 2015–2100
Source: UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division. World Urbanisation Prospects: The 2014 Revision, https://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/DataQuery/
Between now and 2050, the populations of 28 African countries are projected to more than double. By 2100, 10 African countries are projected to have increased their populations at least fivefold: Angola, Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Malawi, Mali, Niger, Somalia, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia. There is a link between poverty and population growth, where the latter is especially high in the group of 48 countries designated by the UN as the least developed countries, of which 27 are in Africa. Africa’s increases are projected despite an anticipated substantial reduction of fertility levels. The UN’s medium variant projection assumes that average fertility will fall from 4.7 children per woman in Africa (in 2010 to 2015) to 3.1 from 2045 to 2050, reaching 2.2 by 2095 to 2100. After 2050, Africa is expected to be the only major continent still experiencing substantial population growth. As a result, the continent’s share of global population is projected to grow to 25 per cent by 2050 and 39 per cent by 2100.
To highlight the disruptive nature of the population growth that Africa will experience, Figure 2 displays the growth of three countries: Burundi (relatively small), Ghana (a medium-sized country) and Nigeria (the continent’s behemoth).21