Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell
Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell
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Sources Overpopulation and Africa
Sources Overpopulation and Africa
Seriously. Why are we making videos like this? This topic was a nightmare. How do you talk about a continent as diverse as Africa, to explain larger trends? Not only is there a wide variety of sources, experts disagree with each other on what they can predict about the future. So the time we took to rewrite this script over and over was insane.
Still, there is no chance in hell this video won’t make people angry, on all sides of this issue. Some may not agree with the conclusions we have come to. Some will think there are other aspects we could and should have mentioned. Or lament that we generalized too much.
But we had to generalize or this video would just have become an hour-long documentary. And we think the topic is too important to not discuss it.
So we read a lot and talked to many experts with very different opinions and interpretations on the subject. Also we tried to prepare our sources in a way that walks you through our thought process and helps you to make up your own mind.
This video was sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as part of a Grant. The Foundation did not comment on the video in any way before we released it.
A huge thanks to the following scientists and experts for their input and help with this video:
- Alisa Kaps
Head of Department of International Demography at Berlin Institute for Population
and Development
https://www.berlin-institut.org/index.php?id=48
- Dr. Bjorn Lomborg
Author
https://www.copenhagenconsensus.com
- Anonymous
Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH
https://www.giz.de/en/html/index.html
Sources:
– For most of our history, human population grew slowly. Until new discoveries brought us more food and made us live longer.
#The size of the world population over the last 12.000 years, OWID, 2018
– In just a hundred years the human population quadrupled.
#World Population Prospects 2019, 2019
https://population.un.org/wpp/Download/Standard/Population/
For a larger picture, check Our World in Data:
#The size of the world population over the last 12.000 years, OWID, 2019
– But the population growth rate actually peaked in the 1960s. Since then, fertility rates have crashed as countries industrialize and develop. World population is now expected to balance out at around 11 billion by the end of the century.
# Future Population Growth, OWID, 2014
https://ourworldindata.org/future-population-growth
“Global population growth has slowed down markedly since the peak in the 1960s. “
– In 2019 Sub-Saharan Africa was home to a billion people living in 46 countries.
The UN Development Program lists 46 of Africa's 54 countries as “Sub-Saharan,” excluding Algeria, Djibouti, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Somalia, Sudan and Tunisia.
#Wikipedia-article: Sub-Saharan Africa, 2019
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-Saharan_Africa
#About Sub-Saharan Africa, UNDP, 2019
http://www.africa.undp.org/content/rba/en/home/regioninfo.html
We also have this chart with population by region, which says the same:
#World population by region, OWID, 2019
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-population-by-world-regions-post-1820
By 2019, Africa was home to around 1.3 billion people:
#African Population (Live), Worldometer, 2019
https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/africa-population/
Around 1.06 billion of them live in Sub-Saharan countries:
#Sub Saharan Population 2019, 2019
http://worldpopulationreview.com/continents/sub-saharan-africa-population/
– Although its growth rate has slowed down in the last few decades, it is still much higher than in the rest of the world.
In this interactive map you can compare growth rates from all over the world:
#Population growth rate, OWID, 2015
https://ourworldindata.org/future-population-growth
– While some projections expect around 2.6 billion people others reckon with up to 5 billion by 2100.
The optimistic projections were made by the IAASA (International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis)
#Population: How Many People Will Live in Africa in 2100?, 2015
https://blog.iiasa.ac.at/2015/10/20/population-how-many-people-will-live-in-africa-in-2100/
Please note: these numbers are from 2015!
There are new numbers from 2018, but these projections only look as far into the future as 2060:
#Demographic and Human Capital Scenarios for the 21st Century: 2018 assessment for 201 countries, 2019
The population of Sub-Saharan Africa, on the other hand, is likely to more than double by 2060 from currently around 1 billion to 2.2 billion under the Medium scenario and even 2.7 billion under the stalled development SSP3 scenario.
The more pessimistic ones are by the UN:
#World Population Prospects 2019, UN, 2019
https://population.un.org/wpp/
If you don't want to go through the trouble, we downloaded the 2019 Excel Spreadsheet for you. Here is a screenshot. The red line is the median projection with 3.8 billion and the pessimistic 90% prediction interval comes up with almost 5 billion.
This table shows all three projections:
https://blog.wp.iiasa.ac.at/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2015/10/table-1.png
A quick side note here: you might be wondering why there are multiple projections that are so different. That is because trying to make predictions about the future is tricky.
Population growth rates depend on how many children are born and how many survive. The UN and the IIASA both agree that child mortality will go down. The difference is: they make different assumptions about how many kids the average African woman will have in the future.
The UN is assuming that this trend will continue because fertility all over Africa has declined slower than in other parts of the world. The IIASA assumes that fertility rates will adapt to the same development patterns that happened all over the rest of the world – which would mean fertility will decline faster than it did in the past.
The IIASA bases their claim on the fact that they take women’s education levels – an important factor for their family planning decisions – and country-specific features into account.
For any projection, even a small difference in children per woman already makes a big difference for population numbers when the effect is viewed over several generations.
This article from Our World in Data covers the importance of African population projections using the IIASA projections:
https://ourworldindata.org/peak-child
And this one might be helpful to understand the role of different fertility rates:
https://ourworldindata.org/future-population-growth
– But Sub-Saharan Africa is also the poorest region on earth.
In terms of financial aspects, extreme poverty means to have less than 1.90$ per day.
#Ending Poverty, 2019
https://www.un.org/en/sections/issues-depth/poverty/
In Sub-Saharan Africa up to 42% of the population continues to live below the poverty line. This is around 71% of all extremely poor people in the world:
#The number of extremely poor people continues to rise in Sub-Saharan Africa, while falling rapidly in all other regions, 2018
https://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/number-extremely-poor-people-continues-rise-sub-saharan-africa
These graphs show that worldwide extreme poverty is on the decline:
https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty#is-the-world-on-track-to-end-extreme-poverty-by-2030
Hunger, poor health and a lack of education are also manifestations of poverty.
In 2018 the Sub-Saharan countries were the ones with the most hunger world wide.
#Global Hunger Index, 2018
https://www.globalhungerindex.org/results/
#Life expectancy, OWID, 2019
#People In Sub-Saharan Africa Rate Their Health And Health Care Among Lowest In World, 2017
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5674528/
#The African Regional Health Report: The Health of the People, 2019
https://www.who.int/bulletin/africanhealth/en/
“While acknowledging that Africa confronts the world's most dramatic public health crisis, the report offers hope that over time the region can address the health challenges it faces, given sufficient international support.”
Global undernourishment shown in graphs:
https://ourworldindata.org/hunger-and-undernourishment#undernourishment-over-time-by-world-region
According to the UNESCO Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest rate of education exclusion:
#Education in Africa
http://uis.unesco.org/en/topic/education-africa
– And while in 2018, three of the five fastest growing economies were from Sub Saharan Africa, income in others is stagnating.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) measures the economic growth of all countries. The link to the official numbers of the IMF was half a page long so we turned it into a bitly-link:
#World Economic Outlook Database, 2019
Unfortunately you can’t sort the countries by their GDP growth in the original table of the IMF, but on Wikipedia you can. So here is the same list, but in the right order:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_real_GDP_growth_rate
The IMF came up with new numbers for 2019 shortly before the release of this video: In 2019 there are still three Sub-Saharan countries among the five fastest growing economies in the world, but not the same ones as in 2018. This chart shows the fastest growing countries of the past years:
#Real GDP growth, 2019
https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/NGDP_RPCH@WEO/OEMDC/ADVEC/WEOWORLD
– A few decades ago, many countries in Asia were at a similar point as Sub-Saharan Africa today: Large parts of the population were living in extreme poverty and birth rates were very high.
This report from the Berlin Institute for Population and Development analyzes in detail which countries have made progress in poverty reduction and development in the past and how those factors correlated with fertility rates.
#Africa’s demographic trailblazers, 2019
#Asia’s second leap forwards, 2014
Our World in Data generally explains extreme poverty here, with a section talking about Asia specifically.
https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-history-methods
# Poverty Reduction in East Asia, 1993
http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/190711468749798158/pdf/multi0page.pdf
#Fertility Rate, 2017
https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate
This graph from OWID shows the fall in fertility rates across Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa:
– Take Bangladesh. In the 1960s, the average woman had seven children in her lifetime.
#Family Planning in Asia and the Pacific Addressing the Challenges, 2010
http://www.icomp.org.my/new/uploads/fpconsultation/Bangladesh.pdf
“During the 1960s, fertility was quite high, with the total fertility rate (TFR) of over 7.”
#Fertility decline in Bangladesh: an emerging family planning success story.,1992
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12285494
Here is a nicer visualization by OWID:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-un?tab=chart&time=1950..2015&country=BGD
– 25% of them died before they turned five and of the ones that survived, only one in five would learn to read and write
In Bangladesh, one in four children died before they turned five years old:
#Child mortality in Bangladesh 1950 – 2016
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/child-mortality?tab=chart&time=1950..2016&country=BGD
There is an Excel Spreadsheet compiling data from the World Bank, the World Factbook and UNESCO. You can download it by clicking on this link or have a look at our screenshot here.
http://www.hbs.edu/businesshistory/Lists/HistoricalData/Attachments/31/literacy.xls
The Excel-Sheet gives a literacy rate of 21.6 % in Bangladesh for the year 1960:
– Life expectancy was around 45 years and the per-capita income was among the lowest in the world.
#Life expectancy at birth, total (years), worldbank, 2017
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN?locations=BD
Here are the same numbers in a nice graph by OWID:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy?time=1876..2019&country=BGD
#GDP per capita (current US$), worldbank, 2015
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?end=2015&locations=BD&start=1960
Here are the same numbers in a nice graph by OWID:
– So beginning in the 1960s Bangladesh started a family planning program, standing on three main pillars:
Here we simplified a lot: First of all, Bangladesh gained independence in 1972, before that it was part of Pakistan. The family planning program we refer to in the video actually consists of several so called “five-year plans”.
The first and the second five year plan were established by the Pakistani government in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Since the independence in 1972 there have been seven five-year plans introduced by the Bengali government.
These plans include a lot more than the three pillars we speak about in the video. The major part of the investments were spent on infrastructure, water-supply and housing, but regarding family planning, the crucial pillars were education, better health care and contraception:
This is the revised second five-year plan introduced by the Pakistani government:
#Pakistan – The revised second plan (1960 _1965)
http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/750571468286258544/pdf/multi0page.pdf
“The Government estimates that the expenditures in the Second Plan will be some 250% above the actual expenditures during the First Plan period.”
Compared to the first five-year plan, the investments in education and health increased drastically.
Here you can download the full plan, but we took some screenshots for you:
#High-Lights of Pakistan’s Second Five Year Plan 1960 – 1965
documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/991321468768584526/pdf/multi0page.pdf
At the same time, the government got aware of the increasing importance of family planning and created a Department of Family Planning.
#Agenda-Setting of Population i Bangladesh and West Bengal and impact on Fertility, 2012
https://paa2012.princeton.edu/papers/121206
“Under the Third Five Year Plan (1961-1966), 92% of allocation was spent, the Department of Family Planning was created within the Ministry of Health, andFP services were integrated with MCH services.”
The measurements of the freshly created department can be grouped into three phases:
#Family Planning in Asia and the Pacific Addressing the Challenges, 2010
http://www.icomp.org.my/new/uploads/fpconsultation/Bangladesh.pdf
“Phase 1 activities were largely voluntary, beginning in the early-1950s. Phase II activities began in 1960, with the government taking some broader steps to check the population growth rate. Population control was made the official policy in the First Five-Year Plan of Pakistan (1960-65). Phase III activities were initiated in 1973 with the launching of the First Five-Year Plan of Bangladesh. The Plan attached equal priority to population control and food production. It marked the beginning of a multi-sectoral and broad-based population control and FP programme in the country.”
This study looks at how Bangladesh and Pakistan developed regarding family planning after they became two separate countries.
#Realising the demographic dividend in Pakistan and Bangladesh, 2014
– Field workers brought contraceptives even to the remotest areas, which drove contraceptive use from 8% in 1975 to 76% in 2019.
Contraceptive use in Bangladesh in 1975:
# Contraceptive practices among married women of reproductive age in Bangladesh: a review of the evidence, 2017
https://reproductive-health-journal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12978-017-0333-2
Modern contraceptive use in Bangladesh in 2019:
# State of World Population Report, United Nations Population Fund, 2019,
https://www.unfpa.org/sites/default/files/pub-pdf/UNFPA_PUB_2019_EN_State_of_World_Population.pdf
– 1960 the average Bangladeshi woman had 7 kids. In 1995, 4, and in 2019 it was down to 2
The most reliable source for this claim is the data offered by the World Bank, but the latest estimates are from 2017. Since then the fertility rate hasn’t changed significantly though.
Birth rate, crude (per 1,000 people), 2017
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.CBRT.IN?locations=BD
These sources provide the birth rate for 2019:
#Bangladesh Population 2019, 2019
http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/bangladesh-population/
“The fertility rate is now at 2.4 children born per woman.“
#Worldometer, Bangladesh Population (live), 2019
https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/bangladesh-population/
Fertility rate 2019 = 2.19
– By 2024 Bangladesh is expected to graduate from the category of „least developed countries“ to the status of a developing economy.
#Leaving the LDCs category: Booming Bangladesh prepares to graduate, 2018
– Other Asian countries like South Korea, China, Thailand or the Philippines have gone through a similar progress, often even faster.
The fertility rate dropped from 6 children per woman in the 1960s to 1 - 2 children in 2014:
#Fertility rate, total (births per woman), World Bank, 2017
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?locations=KR-CN-TH-PH
Also the literacy rate increased since the 1950s:
#Literacy rate, our world in data, 2010
As well as the average GDP in those countries:
#Average GDP per capita across countries and regions, our world in data, 2016
– Throughout Africa child mortality has fallen from 32% in 1950 to 8% in 2015.
#Child mortality, OWID, 2016
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/child-mortality
– But especially in Sub-Saharan Africa education has improved slower than in other parts of the world.
34 million primary age children in the region don’t have the chance to get an education.
More than half of out-of-school primary children are in Sub-Saharan Africa:
https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-children-are-not-in-school.
1-in-5 children in SSA are not in primary school, as this graph from OWID shows:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-primary-school-age-out-of-school?time=1970..2016
# Facing Forward – Schooling for Learning in Africa, 2018
You can download the full report by the World Bank via this link below:
#World Development report 2018, 2019
https://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/wdr2018
This article explains the situation and gives possible reasons.
#Africa grapples with huge disparities in education, 2018
– In total contraceptive use has doubled in the region since 1990
Contraceptive prevalence is the percentage of women currently using any kind of contraception.
# Contraceptive prevalence, any method, % of women age 15-49, Our World in Data
Original source:
#World Development Indicators, 2019
https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/dataset/world-development-indicators
Sub-Saharan-Africa:
1990: 15.95%
2000: 22.09%
2014: 29.79%
– The unmet need for modern contraception among adolescents is still at about 60%
#Adding it Up: Costs and Benefits of Meeting the Contraceptive Needs of Adolescents in Sub-Saharan Africa, Factsheet from Gutmacher Institute, 2018
Among the 53 million women aged 15–19 in Sub-Saharan Africa, 23% (12.1 million) need contraception because they are married, or are unmarried and sexually active, and do not want a child for at least two years.
Of these 12.1 million adolescents, 38% (4.6 million) are using modern contraceptives. The most common method is the male condom (accounting for about four in 10 users), followed by injectables and the pill.
The other 62% (7.5 million) are not using a modern method; these adolescent women have an unmet need for modern contraception. Among these women, 87% are using no method at all, and the remainder use traditional methods, which are less effective than modern methods.
– Many Sub-Saharan Nations have suffered under colonization until only a few decades ago, and had rough transition periods towards independence.
This article by the World Economic Forum highlights the long-term effects of colonization on African economies:
#How Africa’s colonial history affects its development, 2015
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/07/how-africas-colonial-history-affects-its-development/
#Transitions to Democracy in Africa, 1992
https://www.nap.edu/read/2041/chapter/4
–The young nations were often ethnically heterogeneous and lacked unity. Some areas have been repeatedly racked by civil wars, military conflicts or suffered under unstable governments, which made it really hard to expand infrastructure and health care.
Each African country has its own history towards independence. We picked a couple of examples for national conflicts that occured in the second half of the 20th century.
One of the most horrific examples for ethnic conflicts in African countries is the genocide in Rwanda. In 1994 more than 800,000 Tutsis were killed by Hutu extremists.
#Rwanda genocide: 100 days of slaughter, 2019
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-26875506
The World Atlas offers an overview on the different ethnic groups of Rwanda:
#Ethnic Groups Of Rwanda, 2017
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/ethnic-groups-of-rwanda.html
Another example is South Sudan, which gained independence in 2011. Since 2013 a bloody civil war is going on in the youngest country in the world.
#Global Conflict Tracker, 2019
https://www.cfr.org/interactive/global-conflict-tracker/conflict/civil-war-south-sudan
As a consequence of these conflicts the governments in those countries were very unstable and not able to guarantee safety and good living standards.
Eritrea gained independence in 1991 after 30 years of civil war with Ethiopia. Ethnically, Eritrea is one of the most diverse countries in the world:
#Ethnic Groups Of Eritrea, 2017
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/major-ethnic-groups-of-eritrea.html
– Foreign aid and how it was applied, especially during the cold war, is also a contentious issue.
This magazine on political science summarizes the debate on foreign aid in third world countries:
#Economic development and the effectiveness of foreign aid: A historical perspective, 2014
https://voxeu.org/article/development-and-foreign-aid-historical-perspective
This paper reviews the economic literature on foreign aid and highlights the disagreement among researchers.
#Trends and Features of Research on Foreign Aid: A Literature Review, 2017
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/82134/1/MPRA_paper_82134.pdf
“Aid supporters tend to emphasize results, while its detractors tend to highlight the incentives it provides (although they may still acknowledge some of aid’s positive results, particularly on public health)”
Many scientists argue that especially during the Cold War foreign aid was driven by ideological motives, rather than a true interest in helping African countries:
#Foreign Aid after the Cold War, 2008
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/229541853_Foreign_Aid_after_the_Cold_War
– Critics say that trying to bring fertility down is an oppressive way to control Africa and an intrusion into culture and tradition.
http://stream.aljazeera.com/story/201811132143-0025745
In this Al Jazeera video several experts from different fields discuss the topic and answer questions from viewers.
This organisation is criticizing family planning efforts as an intrusion into African culture.
#Defending the Sanctity and Dignity of Life in Africa, 2015
http://cultureoflifeafrica.com
#The Politics of Family Planning Policies and Programs in Sub‐Saharan Africa, 2016
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1728-4457.2016.00165.x
#Africa’s Unique Fertility Transition, 2016
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1728-4457.2016.00164.x
– If population growth continues unhindered at its present rate then Sub-Saharan Africa could grow to 4 billion people. For example, if women get a better education and have their first child just two years later in life. This tiny gap between this generation and the next one would lead to 400 million fewer people in 2100, with 3.6 billion in total. If education and family planning are made available to every African woman, universal access to contraception makes having kids a decision. If families get to choose how many kids they want, birth projections fall by 30%, to 2.8. billion people.
All numbers from the text passage above are based on three different scenarios modeled by the Track 20 project. They compare different interventions on population development and calculate the results.
#Track20
http://www.track20.org/pages/about_us/who_we_are/Track20.php
Scenario 1 (The black line in the infographic):
“If population growth continues unhindered at its present rate then Sub-Saharan Africa could grow to 4 billion people.”
Scenario 2 (The pink line in the infographic):
“This tiny gap between this generation and the next one would lead to 400 million fewer people in 2100, with 3.6 billion in total.”
Scenario 3 (The blue line in the infographic):
“If education and family planning are made available to every African woman, universal access to contraception makes having kids a decision. If families get to choose how many kids they want, birth projections fall by 30%, to 2.8. billion people.”
The scenarios are discussed in detail on page 13 of the Goalkeepers Report 2018:
https://www.gatesfoundation.org/goalkeepers/report/2018-report/?download=true
The highlights of the report can be seen here:
https://www.gatesfoundation.org/goalkeepers/downloads/report_en.pdf
– Ethiopia, the African country with the second-biggest population, has made a lot of progress in a relatively short amount of time. Improving health services lead to a drop in child mortality from 20% to 7% since 1990.
Ethiopia is on track to be the first low-income African country to achieve SDG1 (Sustainable Development Goal 1: end poverty). We forecast that by 2029 less than 3% of Ethiopia’s population will live in extreme poverty.
#Child mortality Ethiopia, Our World in Data
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/child-mortality-around-the-world?country=ETH
The World Poverty Clock provides interesting further reading:
https://worldpoverty.io/blog/index.php?r=21
– Up to 30% of the annual budget was invested into education and the number of schools increased 25-fold over two decades.
The total number of schools in 1995 was around 1326. 19 years later it was more than 34,000. Thus, the number of schools in Ethiopia increased 25-fold in less than two decades.
# From Land of Famine to Land of Hope, 2018
“Major investment in education of up to 30 percent of the national budget has raised the level of education in the country. “
Further reading:
The Goalkeepers Report gives an overview over the topic.
https://www.gatesfoundation.org/goalkeepers/report/2018-report/?download=true
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