Africa’s demographic transition : dividend or disaster?
By David Canning, S. Raja, A. Yazbeck. 2015
188 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The demographic dividend describes the interplay between changes in a population’s age structure due to the demographic transition and rapid economic growth. Except for a few countries in Southern Africa and some island nations, fertility rates and youth dependency rates in Sub-Saharan Africa are among the highest in the world, exposing the region to higher poverty rates, smaller investments in children, lower labor productivity, high unemployment or underemployment, and the risk of political instability. The rapid expansion of school enrollments in the region makes it likely that the total fertility rate of the school-age cohort will be lower than that of previous cohorts. To realize this potential, strategic planning and preparation are required in each country. The first and perhaps most challenging step are to speed up the fertility decline in countries where it is currently slow or stalled. This report presents a positive agenda for increasing the likelihood of first accelerating the demographic transition and then capturing the potential social and economic benefits to create a demographic dividend in Sub-Saharan Africa. There is a real possibility to realize a rapid demographic transition and a large demographic dividend given the region’s rapidly decreasing child mortality, rapidly increasing female school enrollment, increasing demand for family planning, renewed high-level political support for tackling demographic challenges, and rapid economic growth.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, General Health Professions, Safety Research
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/04ed5a8de26224e7b12fe1ba2abccd363a0a69ed
Citations in the corpus
- The performance of African protected areas for lions and their prey (2017, unknown): “This is of particular significance in Africa, where the human population is projected to grow from 1.1 to 2.8 billion by 2060 (Canning et al., 2015).”
- On the Economics and Politics of Refugee Migration (2017, unknown): “Canning et al. (2015) estimate that the population of Africa, Europe’s southern neighbor, will increase to 2.8 billion over the next 45 years. Africa’s population in 2013 was 1.11 billion. Similar projections are provided by a recent (2015) UN report on the World Population,(27) which identifies Afr”
- Africa’s Evolving Employment Trends (2018, unknown): “…policy actions that promote girls’ education, empower women to have greater control over their fertility decisions, and make reproductive health information and contraceptive methods more accessible are effective strategies to reduce fertility rates (Canning et al., 2015; Upadhyay et al., 2014)”