Expert warns on population surge

A leading demographer, Paul Morland, has warned that without good governance, quality education and urgent investment in demographic data, Africa’s surging youth population could become a wasted generation rather than a powerful engine of economic growth.

Morland, a financial services consultant and demographer at Morland Strategic Services Ltd in Barnet, England, has spent decades studying how countries harness — or squander — their demographic potential. In a wide-ranging interview, he outlined what separates a demographic dividend from what he described as a potential demographic time bomb.

According to him, the mechanics of a demographic dividend are precise. It requires not only a large cohort of young people but also a generation that is choosing to have smaller families — a shift that expands the workforce while reducing the burden of dependants on households and public services.

“The demographic dividend really kicks in when you had a lot of kids 20–30 years ago, so there are lots of 20–30 somethings and they’re not having enormous families themselves. You’ve got a large workforce, they’re able to actually participate in the labour force because they haven’t got vast numbers of kids,” he said.

Morland noted that the window for such a dividend is already beginning to open in parts of the continent.

“It’s kicking in in some countries in Africa, those that managed to get their fertility rate down a decade or two ago,” he explained.

However, he cautioned that much of Africa is still decades away from fully benefiting from that demographic transition.

“The demographic dividend is really ahead of Africa because most of Africa still has pretty large families,” he said.

Yet he warned that the transition itself carries risks. Countries that allow fertility to fall too sharply could eventually face the opposite crisis — ageing populations and shrinking workforces.

“The secret is to ensure that when you do get to that point, you don’t go to super low fertility.Because then you’ll have a demographic dividend, you’ll have an economic boom, but that will then be replaced by a demographic winter,” Morland warned.

Automation and the concentration of global supply chains mean that manufacturing is unlikely to employ hundreds of millions of African workers at the scale seen in Asia’s industrial rise.

Instead, he believes the continent’s job creation will increasingly depend on services.

“Everybody used to work in agriculture largely — 80 to 90 per cent of the population. We got the technologies that meant we didn’t need large workforces in the field. Then along came industry. Lots of countries haven’t even industrialised. There’s massive work in services, both within the country and for overseas markets,” he said.

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However, Morland stressed that services-led growth does not happen automatically.

“If you’re going to do it in a high-value-added, prosperous way, you need great education,” he said, underscoring the importance of sustained government investment in schools, skills training and digital infrastructure.Another major constraint, he argued, is the lack of reliable demographic data across the continent.

Morland noted that many African governments do not know with sufficient precision how many people they have, where those people are located or how quickly their populations are changing.

“Demographic data is probably poorest in Africa, which is not surprising — the more advanced a country is, the better its data,” he said.

“If you don’t know how many people you have, it’s very difficult to plan for schools, for hospitals, for what size of workforce you’re going to have. If you don’t know where your demography is, how old your people are, how many children your women are having, you’re really flying blind and it’s difficult to plan anything.”

He therefore called for heavy investment in demographic data collection across the continent, describing it as a foundation for effective policymaking on issues ranging from food security to job creation. On Nigeria, Morland said the country illustrates both the extraordinary opportunity and the immense risk of Africa’s demographic trajectory.

“Already Africa’s most populous nation with more than 220 million people, Nigeria is projected to surpass the United States and become the world’s third most populous country by mid-century.The scale is extraordinary,” he said, noting that whether such growth generates prosperity will depend largely on governance rather than any single policy intervention.

“I don’t think it’s one policy failure,” he said when asked what single misstep could derail Nigeria’s potential. “It’s good governance. If you’ve got good governance, all the rest of the policy fits into place.”

He added that entrepreneurs must believe their investments and innovations will be protected.

“People have to believe that if they set up businesses, they are going to reap the benefits, that they won’t be the subject of corruption, that the rule of law will apply,” he said.

Without that confidence, Morland warned, economic incentives begin to collapse.