Kenya — a window into Africa’s demographic future

When Catherine Owinga, a nurse in Nairobi, was born in the late 1970s Kenyan women were giving birth to an average of almost eight children each. Today, that figure is just above three.

“People are getting educated, and that changes perceptions about childbirth,” said Owinga, who manages a busy branch of Jacaranda Maternity in Nairobi’s crowded lower-middle-class district of Umoja, part of a chain of private but low-cost maternity health clinics.

“People say, ‘I want to have my own money, I want a career, I want to be empowered. So tell me about giving birth later’,” Owinga said over the din of music and traffic from the street below.

As the decline in fertility rates across most continents has gathered pace — to a point where many politicians are deeply concerned about the consequences of fewer births — youthful Africa has long been seen as the exception. The continent’s population is expected to increase from 1.5bn today to roughly 2.5bn in 2050, according to UN projections.

At a time when many regions of the world are set to see outright falls in population, that rise means that by midway through this century, one in four people on Earth will live in Africa. That compares with one in eleven at the time when most African states were gaining independence in the early 1960s.

Yet across Africa, particularly in cities such as Nairobi, more women are sounding like their contemporaries in other parts of the world when they talk about childbearing. The continent is now mirroring global falls in birth rates, albeit from much higher levels.

Often the trend sets in as a nation’s economic prospects, particularly those of women, improve. Higher income is one factor that encourages people to have fewer children, which in turn raises their ability to save and invest in things such as education.

“Africa is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, moving parts in these huge global shifts in demography,” said Edward Paice, author of Youthquake, a book on African demographics.

“My real drive is to get people both inside and outside the continent to start thinking about how this may impact everything in the world from geopolitics, fashion, poverty rates and availability of resources,” he said.

Partly as a result of trends in Africa, the global population will rise until the mid-2080s, when it will peak at 10.3bn, according to the UN’s latest median projection.

Across Africa, the average fertility rate is 4.1 births per woman, the rate at which a population doubles every 17 years. This is far higher than the “replacement rate” of 2.1 at which a population begins to stabilise.

However, according to the UN’s latest median prediction, Africa’s fertility rate will fall to 3.8 by 2030 and roughly 2.7 by 2050. The speed at which it falls will help determine, according to demographers and economists, families’ ability to save and invest in their children — individual decisions that shape a country’s growth prospects.

The projected drop is a quicker one than took place historically in Europe, where it took some countries a century for fertility rates to halve from five children per woman.

But it would be slower than in many Asian nations, such as Vietnam, where the same demographic transition took place in less than two decades. “In most African countries, the fertility transition is happening more gradually,” said Paice.

Kenya’s fertility rate of 3.2 means its population is closer to flattening off than those of many African countries. Even so, the number of Kenyans will keep rising for decades to come. It is expected to peak in the 2090s at just above 100mn people, up from a current 55mn.

Bintu Zahara Sakor, a demographer and visiting scholar at Harvard, worries that Africa’s relatively slow transition means it will miss out on an Asian-style demographic dividend that economists credit as a big factor behind economic take-off, a period in which countries achieve a burst of transformative growth.

The dividend, she said, resulted from a rapid fall in fertility rates, which led to a bulge in people of working age and a sharp reduction in dependants.

That allowed more savings and more investment in each child, Sakor said. But, she added: “Even in the case of Kenya, you still won’t get to the place which leads to the sort of demographic dividend that the Asian tigers experienced.”

Nor, adds Sakor, are the other factors in place that helped successful Asian economies put their youthful populations to work. In much of Africa, where formal employment is scarce, she worries that governments have not invested enough in developing human capital, particularly of women and young people, squandering the opportunities linked to creative, youthful populations.

The median age in Africa is 19, against 40 in China and 45 in Europe.

Still, the factors suppressing birth rates in parts of Africa are the same as those worldwide. As people move to cities, where roughly 45 per cent of Africans now live, children become an expense rather than a potential source of labour.

And as more babies survive to their fifth birthday — the child mortality rate has plummeted from one in five in 1980 to one in 25 today — women adapt by having fewer babies.

In poorer African countries, where the decline in fertility has been slower than in Kenya, the population is expected to rise even more rapidly. In neighbouring Tanzania, where the fertility rate is 4.5, the population is forecast to increase to 128mn by 2050, up from 70mn today and just 10mn when the country became independent in 1961.

Over the 90 years to 2050, the population of Niger, which has the world’s highest fertility rate at 6.6, is expected to have risen from 3.4mn to about 50mn — an almost fifteenfold expansion. By contrast, the population of Thailand will have increased by 2.4 times over that period.

The Baby Gap

This is the second article in a series on the looming global demographic crisis as population levels are set to shrink

Part 1: Politicians want more children but their policies are falling short

Part 2: Kenya — a window into Africa’s demographic future

Part 3: The country that migration left behind

Part 4: The Korean city where birth rates have fallen to ‘extinction’ levels

Some commentators in Africa, including politicians who rarely talk about rising populations in negative terms, reject the idea that high fertility rates are a problem.

John Magufuli, the late Tanzanian president, urged women to “throw their contraceptives away” and said a bigger population would strengthen the country. “I have travelled to Europe and elsewhere and have seen the harmful effects of birth control,” he said.

Supporters of a big population often cite supposed cultural reasons for a preference for large African families. They also point out correctly that much of Africa is still sparsely populated.

Sakor said support for bigger families reflected patriarchal views. “A high birth rate puts all the strain on women. It limits women’s potential to access education, to enter the workforce and to contribute to the economy.”

Charlie Robertson, head of macro policy at FIM Partners, said the argument for bigger families masked a basic truth. Countries with high birth rates were poor, he said. Though it can be hard to disentangle cause and effect, he added, no nation with a fertility rate much above three had escaped poverty.

“Some fund managers think a demographic dividend is lots of young people. I say that’s lots of young people who will be poor,” he said.

Robertson, whose book The Time-Travelling Economist analyses the preconditions for economic take-off, has plotted fertility rates against bank savings. He concludes that only when the fertility rate drops below three do banking systems have enough savings to fund development at reasonable interest rates.

Savings in countries where families care for many dependants rarely climb above 30 per cent of GDP, he said, and only reach a healthier 60 per cent when women start having fewer than three children.

The good news, said Robertson, is that the latest UN projections show fertility rates in several African countries falling faster than previously expected. Kenya, he said, will reach a fertility rate of three by 2029 if not before, roughly the same level as Mauritius in 1979 and Indonesia in 1995, when their economies began to motor.

In Nairobi’s upper-middle class neighbourhood of Westlands, Margaret Njeru, head of maternity at MP Shah, a private hospital, said better-off women are making informed decisions.

“These are educated people and they have Mr Google and ChatGPT,” she said. “People want to have a small family that they can afford: that means two to three children.”

Dr Fauzia Butt, consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist at the hospital, said some professional Kenyan women were delaying having children until their 40s, then struggling to conceive. “If you want to have a family you shouldn’t wait too long,” she advises.

But if Robertson’s analysis is correct, even though the demographic transition is slower than in Asia, the growing tendency to have smaller families should trigger a surge in bank savings and result in cheaper finance for businesses and public projects like electricity installation.

“This has literally brought forward development in Kenya by a decade,” he said.