The Demographic
Dividend

Start with a number: 19.3. That is Africa’s median age. Half the continent’s 1.53 billion people are teenagers or younger. Now compare: Europe is 44.4. Japan is 48.6. China is 39 and falling fast, its workforce shrinking by millions per year. The United States is 38.5 with a fertility rate of 1.6 — well below replacement. The rich world is aging out. Africa is aging in.

This is the single fact that makes every other Africa story make sense. The infrastructure revolution is not happening because governments woke up. It is happening because you cannot house, feed, educate, transport, and employ a population that doubles every 25 years without building at a pace that has no precedent in human history. The $2.5 trillion in planned projects is not ambition. It is arithmetic.

The demographic dividend is a seductive concept. The theory: when fertility drops, the ratio of workers to dependants improves, savings increase, investment rises, and growth accelerates — the engine that powered the Asian Tigers, China, and India. The promise: if Africa invests in education, health, and job creation while its working-age population surges, per capita income could quadruple by 2050.

The problem is the “if.” The dividend is not a demographic inevitability. It is a policy outcome. And the policy window is narrow. China reached its peak worker-to-dependant ratio at 2.8 in 2010, then reaped three decades of extraordinary growth. Nigeria will not enter its window until 2060, and its peak ratio will be only 2.0 — meaning the structural advantage will be smaller and the preparation time longer.

The harder story is what happens without the dividend. Twenty million young Africans will enter the labour force every year by 2035 — more than the rest of the world combined. If the economies that receive them cannot provide productive employment, the youth bulge becomes a youth bomb. This is not speculation. The evidence is already visible: youth-led protests in Senegal, Nigeria, Kenya, and Ethiopia. Waves of migration across the Mediterranean. Recruitment by armed groups in the Sahel. The correlation between high fertility, low income, and instability is not a coincidence — six of the seven highest-fertility countries in Africa are low-income.

What makes Morocco, Tunisia, and South Africa interesting is that they have already entered their dividend window. Their fertility rates are near or below replacement. Their median ages are approaching 30. They are the test case for whether African economies can convert demographic transition into prosperity — or whether they will age before they get rich, as some economists fear.

The megacity explosion is the physical manifestation of all this. Lagos went from 200,000 to 17 million in sixty years and will reach 88 million by the end of the century. Dar es Salaam grows 118% by 2050. These are not cities that can be retrofitted. They are cities that must be built from the ground up, right now, for populations that are arriving whether the infrastructure is ready or not. Every road, power line, and water pipe laid this decade determines whether these cities become engines of prosperity or pressure cookers of inequality.

Europe will need Africa’s workers. Africa will need Europe’s capital. The question is whether this exchange happens through orderly systems — migration frameworks, investment partnerships, trade integration — or through the chaotic, dangerous, and politically explosive channels that dominate today. The demographic arithmetic does not care about politics. It just keeps counting.