How Will a Population Boom Change Africa?
The Inquiry
BBC
4.6 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 22 December 2015
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The UN forecasts that the number of people living in Africa will double in the next 35 years. Nigeria, the fastest-growing nation, is expected to become the third-largest country in the world by 2050. By the end of the century, almost 40% of the world’s population will live on this one continent. It raises questions about how countries – some of which are already facing big challenges – will cope with twice the number of inhabitants in just one generation. There are fears about the impact a demographic explosion will have on health, society and the environment. But others say Africa’s population boom could turn out to be a good news story. How will a population boom change Africa? Ruth Alexander investigates.
(Photo: Onitsha-Asaba Highway. Credit: Pius Utomi Ekpei/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC World Service, I'm Ruth Alexander with The Inquiry. This week, another chance to hear our program, |
| 0:06.6 | how will a population boom change Africa? It's the year 2050, in Ireland Maternity Hospital, |
| 0:20.0 | in Lagos on the Nigerian coast. |
| 0:22.6 | Doctors and nurses are rushing around tending to their patients. |
| 0:25.9 | It's a busy day, but they're used to that. |
| 0:28.6 | In one of the beds, a mother is peacefully cradling her newborn daughter. |
| 0:33.2 | She's special, and not just to her mother. |
| 0:36.1 | This tiny human has just become Nigeria's 400 millionth |
| 0:41.3 | citizen. In just 35 years, the number of people living in this country has doubled. In fact, |
| 0:51.3 | the population of the entire continent has doubled. |
| 0:57.0 | This is the future, envisaged by the United Nations. The growth in the number of Africans |
| 1:03.4 | will be huge, quick and inevitable, they say. So in this inquiry, we want to know how will a population boom change Africa? Part 1. The Numbers The Numbers Thank you. Let's start by digging into the data. |
| 1:38.7 | Our first expert witness is John Wilmoth, a people watcher on a global scale. |
| 1:47.7 | It gives you a certain perspective on the world. You see these grand trends of history through |
| 1:53.0 | demography, birth and death and when people become married and when they move around the world. |
| 1:58.9 | These most fundamental things, these individual acts |
| 2:02.0 | come together into these collective trends which shape the world as a whole. And that is quite |
| 2:07.7 | exciting to see that and understand how it works. To give John his official title, he's the director |
| 2:13.7 | of the population division of the United Nations, which has just updated its population |
| 2:18.9 | projections. Well, the current world population of around 7.3 billion is expected to increase to |
| 2:24.8 | around 8.5 billion in 2030, continuing to around 9.7 in 2050, and continuing from there, |
| 2:33.6 | gradually slowing down, but continuing to increase probably |
... |
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