Friday, March 29, 2024

What’s Driving Africa’s Population Growth. And What Can Change It

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Population growth rates continue to pose lingering challenges to development efforts on the continent. The population of Africa is expected to roughly double by 2050. This will add 1.2 billion people to Africa’s 2019 population of 1.3 billion people.

What’s driving population growth on the continent, and what can be done to slow the trend, is one of the subjects that will be addressed this week at the 8th African Population Conference in Entebbe in Uganda. A focus of the debate will be the role of behavioural nudges – interventions designed to change people’s behaviour – and incentives in achieving demographic transition in Africa.

On the table will be the question: can, and should, incentives and nudges be used to effect changes in fertility patterns on the continent? Some of the issues that will be considered include: the ethical implications of incentivising behaviour; whether incentives and nudges work, and under what conditions; which specific incentives and nudges are recommended; who incentives should target, and why.

These questions can best be answered by considering the key drivers of population growth in Africa. The main one is high fertility which is driven by multiple factors, including high desired family size, low levels of use of modern contraceptives, and high levels of adolescent childbearing.

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