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The slowing in population growth in Africa has been less than anticipated

• deanCommie 11y ago
  Can we just go ahead and blame Religion and lack of proper contraception education on this?
  • apalmer 11y ago
    Why? Its not really warranted by the article
  • ghshephard 11y ago
    Nothing in the article mentions religion, and almost 50%+ of it discusses the very significant impact of a multitude of contraception education and resources, by various organizations around the world.
  • Scarblac 11y ago
    One factor to blame is infant mortality -- people want many kids because they don't know how many are going to survive. As soon as most kids survive, people want to have 2.
  • AtlasLion 11y ago
    I will go ahead and dislike this stupid comment instead.
• VLM 11y ago
  Every time I read an ever more ridiculous "present continues into the future, unchanged, unlimited" claiming ever more billions of Africans, I think to myself a quote right out of this article “I couldn’t feed more children,”. What I'm not sure is why. My guess is its financial propaganda such that if you assume food, jobs, energy, and economic activity will magically fall from heaven, then a company selling housewares would logically expect tripling the population would result in triple revenue leading to more than triple profits. That sounds like nice clickbait, and the bar rises every time clickbait is published, so I'm not surprised the bar right now is 4 billion africans. I'm sure to keep the financial press happy it'll be up to 8, maybe 10 billion by the end of next year. Reality of course, with declining energy supplies and declining raw material and declining farmland, and increased lethality of weapons, is the 3rd world is going to take a bigger hit than the rest of the planet, so there's likely to be a modest population decline via the traditional unpleasant to think about methods. There's a tragedy of the commons effect where on a societal level if at the gut level you know declines are coming, you're better off if everyone has fewer kids, but on an individual level both you AND all your other kids are better off if you have a larger family unit.
  • apalmer 11y ago
    Its just game theory more or less...
  • vlehto 11y ago
    I'd like to nitpick a little. I'm bit of history buff and weapons buff and as a result military history buff. "Lethality" of weapon could be defined in many ways. You could claim that lethality has not increased significantly since Hellenic period. Depends entirely form definition.
• SRSposter 11y ago
  And what people will be blamed when the eventual famine comes?
• jokoon 11y ago
  Well yeah, that's what happens when you bring food aid without sexual education.
  • dragonwriter 11y ago
    Its what happens when you bring any kind of improvement individual immediate circumstances without strong social safety nets, because family, especially immediate family, is the social safety net.
  • vlehto 11y ago
    It was probably more about vaccinations. Vaccinations in Africa started around WWII and that's also when the population started to climb.
• gtpasqual 11y ago
  With a slowing population in developed countries, I fear populist mass movements against the West. It's a fact that Sub-Saharan Africans have the lowest IQ in the world. The worst atrocities in history have come out of desperate uneducated people. No racism here. EDIT: Ideologies do not change facts. Recognizing the difference doesn't imply it's based on genetics. Blame lack of education or imperialism, the IQ difference still is there. http://www.ttu.ee/public/m/mart-murdvee/EconPsy/2/Lynn_Meisenberg_2010_National_IQs_calculated_and_validated_for_108_nations.pdf http://www.ttu.ee/public/m/mart-murdvee/EconPsy/2/Lynn_Meise... http://mason.gmu.edu/~gjonesb/JonesADR http://mason.gmu.edu/~gjonesb/JonesADR
  • AtlasLion 11y ago
    "No racism here." Really?
    • seivan 11y ago
      The racist part was the lack of sourcing for the statements above. I'm sure if the poster in question had stated sources for the various claims you would... Still call it racist?
      • rustynails 11y ago
        The note that was added made a big difference. There is no genetic basis implied, it's assessed on an environmental basis. The links do an excellent job at summarising some measures of IQ. Another question is why raise the comment? This could imply a prejudice. While the reasoning wasn't clear, it made me think that Africa is a source of radicals unless its education standard can be lifted. I have little faith in most sites being able to objectively discuss differences, but HN is still better than most. I encourage people to challenge prejudice in a consistent way (eg. No free tickets on being prejudiced based on gender or skin colour, unlike what happens at The Verge and most other media sites).
  • nahomag 11y ago
    Lets not speak of the fact the "West" had the Berlin conference in 1884-85 to divvy up Africa between themselves. And committed lots of atrocities against the native populations (see atrocities by Belgium in the Congo as an example). So much for high IQ and education.
• killerpopiller 11y ago
  Parasites (round worms) in Africa boost fertility in women since they seem to suppress imuno-reactions paving the way for sperms. (see Aaron Blackwell University of California) Probably one reason why their fertility is with 4,7 children/women (2015) higher than 1,6 in EU. http://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/1724/umfrage/weltweite-fertilitaetsrate-nach-kontinenten/ http://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/1724/umfrage/w...
  • OneOneOneOne 11y ago
    If true that is a minor factor compared to differences in birth control use, abortion rate and mother's age at first child.
• AtlasLion 11y ago
  Relevant: "DON'T PANIC — Hans Rosling showing the facts about population" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E
  • vlehto 11y ago
    From the article: >The declining birth rate elsewhere has brought the world to the verge of what Hans Rosling, a Swedish demographer, calls “peak child” But then: >The revision of population predictions for Africa partly reflects the fact that HIV/AIDS has not proved quite as catastrophic for the continent as seemed likely ten years ago.
  • deepnet 11y ago
    In the parent video Hans Rosling objects to the use of the adjective 'explosion' when referring to other peoples children. This comes from the 1950's 'red-scare' idea that foreign communists would have lots of babies who would grow and then invade America. He goes on to show that such a description of the statistics is inaccurate and scare-mongering.
• theklub 11y ago
  Interesting this came up today. I was looking at maps of Greenland and then became reminded of how most of the maps we normally look at are wrong. (proportion-wise) Including the one in the article. Here is a Peter's map - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall%E2%80%93Peters_projection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall%E2%80%93Peters_projection My point is Africa is huge.
  • vlehto 11y ago
    That's wrong too in a way. Projections are always compromises. I prefer waterman butterfly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterman_butterfly_projection#/media/File:Waterman_projection_%28Pacific_centered%29.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterman_butterfly_projection#...
    • theklub 11y ago
      I like that one too, Africa looks even bigger there.
  • helb 11y ago
    Perhaps you've already seen it, but this is a nice comparison – http://kai.sub.blue/en/africa.html http://kai.sub.blue/en/africa.html
    • toomuchtodo 11y ago
      Thanks for sharing this, I had never seen it. I'm astounded that you can fit the entire US in Africa and still have room left over.
  • Shorel 11y ago
    We have WebGL now, all maps could be rotating spheres if we cared about it.
    • anonymfus 11y ago
      The strange thing is that on many maps rotating sphere is implemented for satellite view but switching to actual map also means switching to Merkator.
• joenot443 11y ago
  "The UN reckons that the share of Ethiopian women aged 15-49 who use some form of contraception has risen from 6% in 2000 to 40% last year." What a remarkable statistic. While 40% is still far from ideal, it does show that the push for sexual education has been at least somewhat successful.
  • stevoski 11y ago
    Take UN statistics for a country like Ethiopia with a huge grain of salt. It is mostly just guesswork and later revisions tend to be extreme. It is not quite the UN's fault - I'm sure their raw data comes with caveats. It is hard for anybody to get accurate data for a country with Ethiopian-style government, administration, and infrastructure.
• jug5 11y ago
  Maybe they can all be refugees and flood the rest of the world.
• sevensor 11y ago
  As always, the article is a lot more nuanced than the headline. Stability, liberal government, and prosperity increase demand for and access to contraception. Eventually population stabilizes. The explosion from the headline is simply a forecast for growth to slow later than expected. But the message is that nobody really knows what's going to happen in Africa. News at 11.
  • tokenadult 11y ago
    Yes. As the article notes, "The tendency for societies to have fewer children as they become richer appears to be universal. It holds good across races, religions and ethnicities. Thus the fertility rate is the same (2.3) in Azerbaijan (which is largely Muslim), Mexico (largely Christian), Myanmar (largely Buddhist) and Nepal (largely Hindu). By the same token, many countries that remain relatively rural—Bangladesh, India and Vietnam, for example—have nonetheless seen sharp falls in fertility, albeit not quite to the levels of heavily urbanised ones, such as Brazil." The slowing in population growth in Africa has been less than anticipated in earlier projections, although the article points out that Addis Ababa has a fertility rate below two children per woman, just like the rates in rich countries. The article includes other nuanced information about what might help African people adjust to planning family sizes appropriate for the new economic realities in their countries as those countries prosper. Further economic development throughout the continent, which depends on improvements in governance, is still crucial.
  • dang 11y ago
    Ok, we changed the title from "Africa faces a population explosion" to a representative sentence from the quote by tokenadult. Thanks to both of you.
• lucio 11y ago
  The comments are better than the article itself. From: NdiliMfumu Dec 14th, 03:10 Today's problems with overpopulation are directly related to Mankind's evolution, as are many other modern discontents: Prior to the modern era (especially, prior to the beginning of organized agriculture in the Middle East, 12,000 years ago), Mankind was a predominantly nomadic beast who wandered about, following natural herds and eating whatever fruits, nuts and other small vegetables he could find, whenever he couldn't fell another water buffalo or gazelle. In this condition, food was generally scarce, disease common and rampant, children frequently taken by the passing lion or wave of dysentery, and the population constantly under threat. It made sense for us to evolve to be continuously fecund, always seeking meat, salt and sweets (fruits), and to avoid anything foul, bitter or unduly acidic. People tended to be lean and stringy, eager to sock away a bit of fat or sodium for the next dry and desperate week ahead. We were not used to regular access to food, drink, salt or sugar, nor were we quite used to seeing our numbers grow. Ah, then, we learned settled agriculture and everything began to change. Suddenly, there was a much more certain supply of food and drink. Sweets became more commonplace. Salt was easier to come by. And there was ever so much more opportunity for sex, now that the new girl just moved in next door. Over the centuries after the onset of settled agriculture, human populations grew rather steadily. From merely about 25,000 souls in 50,000 BCE, we grew to around 100,000,000 souls around the year 1 CE. This is an intrinsic rate of population growth of only 0.016 % per year. Hardly much, but enough to be very successful as a species over a long period. Yet, it pales in comparison to the modern rate of intrinsic population growth, which has often been above 2.5% per year. What has happened in the meantime? The Industrial Revolution enabled human populations to intensively urbanize, elevating millions from abject poverty, bringing in its train electricity, among other things, and the development of artificial ammonia production. This was critical. Together with artificial fertilizer and increasing agricultural mechanization, farm productivity bounded and food became increasingly cheap in most parts of the world during the last 200 years. At the same time, SANITARY practices (especially, sewage system development and water purification projects) deprived the River Styx of legions of children who would otherwise have died of dysentery and early childhood respiratory illness. All this came about long before modern medicine could penetrate into most parts of the world, and well before antibiotics were developed and could play their role. Between 1800 and 1950 (when penicillin began to become much more prevalent), death rates plummeted and the intrinsic rate of population growth exploded. At the same time, Mankind began to fall ill from diseases of excess: Excess salt leading to hypertension, excess sugar and fat tending towards morbid obesity and adult-onset diabetes, excess nicotine tending to heart attack, stroke and cancer. What we see, here, are very swift cultural, economic and political changes sweeping over the Human Condition, much faster than can be accommodated by the usual evolutionary processes, alone. The Human Genome simply cannot respond quickly enough to doff the tendency to want more: More food, more sex, more sugar, more fat, more stimulation. All those things which for millennia we longed for, now, we have in great surfeit. The tendency for wealthier, urbanized families to have fewer children and to start later is a direct reflection of the population pressure experienced by large numbers of people living in close quarters. We can help this along by encouraging people to continue leaving the countryside: Raise taxes on idle farmland and pastureland, on rural homes, and on train/bus rides terminating in the hinterland ! Similarly, give families income support and training to relocate into cities. Offer them apartments, jobs, healthcare and continuous education. Pay them to forego having more children, and to educate the ones they have better. Offer particularly young women money and apartments to stay single and childless until they're at least 25 years old thereby cutting their fecundity in half. And of course, make reproductive health services, including contraception and abortion services, broadly available, safe and cheap for young women. The current and continuing crisis of world-wide deleterious climate change is, like overpopulation, a direct reflection of our evolutionary challenge and current inadequacy. Were it not for the 7.32 BN of us already alive in such vast numbers, there would be many more fish in the seas, much more oil in the ground and much less carbon in the atmosphere. Time for a thorough-going and purposeful change: Let’s not leave it to evolution, lest we go the way of the dinosaurs ! Continuing fecundity in Africa is the direct result of the general lack of urbanization, there, as compared with other continents, as well as cultural values emphasizing fecundity and large families, and the general level of poverty and illiteracy. But this is rapidly changing, as the article points out. As African nations lift themselves from poverty and progressively urbanize, e.g., Nigeria, today, fecundity drops and the intrinsic rate of population growth along with it. Nigerian women, especially those who live in Lagos and other large cities (e.g., Abuja, Port Harcourt, Benin City, Ibadan, Kano, Kaduna) are increasingly interested in getting an education, making money and deferring marriage. Deferring the start of childrearing has a dramatic effect on overall fecundity. Deferring a first pregnancy to the age of 25 cuts an average woman's lifetime fecundity in half. The major impediments to successful population control are largely culturally determined resistance -- especially male chauvinism, heterosexism, paternalism and religiously-driven moral imperatives to "be fruitful and multiply" (this, largely an attempt on the part of these religions to secure and increase their numbers by indoctrinating newborns in the faith). But all these impediments tend to fall by the wayside, when young women and families enter into urban areas: The anomie of the cities assists young people in escaping the control of their parents and their clergy. "Traditional values" tend to fall victim to "modernism". "Contraception" is no longer a dirty word. Liberality and social mobility go hand in hand. Staid and stoic traditionalist parents tend to shut up, when their well-educated daughters are sending home then rent cheque from Lagos ! Africa's population will bound towards 2 billion or more by the end of the 21st century, but then it will stabilize. By that time, if we're lucky, the Earth will host more than 12 BN souls, and we shall be straining the world's resources to the limit. If we have some real luck, hydrogen fusion power will replace fossil fuels and nuclear fission, entirely. We will devote the new, cheap and nearly limitless power to cleaning up the environment, sucking the carbon out of the atmosphere and burying it in the deep seas, planting billions of trees, and building tall and narrow cities, leaving vast tracts of open land to the animals, the insects and the other flora and fauna. We shall swing from mile-high elevators much like our distant ancestors swung through tropical forests. And we shall begin to colonize the Moon, Mars and other regions of space, as well. Time for a thorough-going change!
• theworstshill 11y ago
  I've got no issues with a population explosion over there. They are sovereign people and noone should tell them what to do. As long as the west doesn't have idiots like Angela Merkel at the helm, everybody can mind their own business.
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
    • tveita 11y ago
      So do the children share the blame?
• deleted 11y ago
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• acd 11y ago
  Hans Rosling Gapminder https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ4vFAGBG5k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ4vFAGBG5k Babies per woman in Africa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7P1UiAo09E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7P1UiAo09E
• millermp12 11y ago
  "Thanks to the continued growth of Africa’s population, however, the peak will be more of a plateau. High birth rates in Africa and low ones elsewhere will more or less balance out. Africans will make up a bigger and bigger share of the world’s young people: by 2100, they will account for 48% of those aged 14 and under." Yes, thank goodness for Africans doubling their populations every 25 years! We're saved! It's going to be totes awesome, like Detroit, but more "vibrant."