Development - Opinion
All Futurism is Afrofuturism By Noah Smith
EVERY SO OFTEN I GET the urge to blog about something really important, so today I think I’ll write about Africa. Afrofuturism is a fun and interesting subgenre of science fiction and philosophy:, but I kind of chuckle every time I see the word, because all futurism is actually Afrofuturism. Africa is literally the future of the entire world. Here is one of the two or three most important charts you will ever see:
level, than any other region except India:
And here’s a picture of the seven most populous countries in Africa. You can already see the fertility transition happening, though Nigeria, DRC, and Tanzania are still in the early stages.
Notice that this is the projection for total population. It has Africa just about equal to Asia by the end of the century, but if we were to look at only young population, Africa would have a clear majority here. “Wait,” you may be about to ask. “Are these 80-year-ahead projections really reliable? What if African fertility falls?” And the answer is: It’s going to fall! It’s already falling fast. As countries get richer their fertility rates drop; as Lyman Stone shows, Africa’s fertility rates are dropping faster, relative to their income 38
March-April 2021
A recent paper in The Lancet attempts to model how African population will change as women’s education and access to contraception (the two biggest things other than GDP that we know affect fertility) increase. They predict a population for Sub-Saharan Africa of about 3.4 billion by century’s DAWN
www.africabusinessassociation.org
