Are Africa’s Problems Due to Excessive Fertility?
No-ish.
Emmanuel Macron today supposedly made a claim in a speech that many of Africa’s problems are due to women having 7 or 8 kids and having a bad civilization. Here’s the clip:
Here is an early rough translation that was circulating, for our non-Francophones i.e. uncivilized barbarians of the wilderness:
Well, okay then. Apparently women having babies means rapacious former colonial powers don’t have a responsibility because you can’t help high-fertility places.
But seriously, is there any truth to the claim that African fertility is 7 or 8 children per woman?
African Fertility Trends
Let’s start by asking: are there places in Africa where 7 or 8 kids are born per woman?
Okay, so there is one country in Africa where TFR is over 7, Niger. And if you look at Macron’s comments, it does seem he’s talking about one specific place, probably Niger, as it is Francophone.
But TFR is misleading. I’ve explained at length elsewhere how TFR is a blunt forecast; what we really want to know is completed fertility. So take a country much further along the demographic transition than Niger, say, Ghana or Rwanda. Here’s TFR in Ghana, Rwanda, and Niger since 1960:
Now, without detailed age tables, we can’t exactly compute how the completed fertility of the girls reflected by TFR in each year would end up looking. But we can make some guesses. Take Burkinabe women in 1985 as an example. If we assume age-specific fertility would fall symmetrically across groups and assume that fertility is distributed around a high point at, say, age 20, then completed fertility for Burkinabe women was probably something around 6.6 for women who would have been age 40 in 2015. When those women were first entering fertility statistics, their associated forecast total fertility rate was 7.1; so completed fertility almost certainly underperformance forecast total fertility. In the case of Rwanda, women in 2015 probably had completed fertility of about 6, versus a forecast total fertility when they first entered the fertility pool of about 8: Rwandan women probably had almost 2 less children than TFR would forecast. Ghana is approximately between Burkina Faso and Rwanda.
Niger may be in the early stages of demographic transition. If we assume Niger will begin experiencing the same trends Burkina Faso has, then Niger will reach Burkina Faso’s current levels of fertility around 2050, and women entering the fertility pool in Niger today will have completed fertility of about or just under 7 children per woman, versus current total fertility forecast of about 7.5.
That’s still a lot of babies.
But if we look at the poorer West African countries generally, we will see how unusual Niger really is:
That is, Niger is the outlier here. Macron, discussing Africa generally, gave as his example the one part of Francophone Africa that has not begun to experience the demographic transition.
Now, look. If you want to make an argument that we are better off focusing on Benin than Niger for development, or something like that, be my guest. But don’t toss out the example of Niger to talk about Africa. Niger is an outlier. When talking about Africa, your mental image should be a region that remains high fertility, but is fairly quickly becoming not-so-high-fertility. South Africa, Tunisia, and Morocco aren’t even that much above replacement rate.
Is High Fertility Bad?
There is an enormous economic development debate about the economics of demographic transition. Broadly speaking, having a big workforce alongside few dependents people should help boost your economy. There are caveats and disagreements, but the “demographic dividend” is, as far as it goes, probably a real thing within the confines of the market. So during the period of declining fertility, economic growth should be substantial as people have fewer kids to deal with, a large workforce, and few elderly people.
But there are some caveats, especially when we step outside of your normal product and service markets. For example, higher fertility may alter the rate of child abandonment or neglect. More kids could mean more abandonment as parents are more strapped for resources. Abandoned or neglected kids not only represent a humanitarian concern, but as they grow up they may form an underclass that is cut off from society and unlikely to respect institutions and the rule of law.
On the other hand, say you do have high fertility and a high degree of social instability. Now say you suddenly reduce fertility; i.e. people have fewer kids. Will social stability ensue? That’s not actually clear on any a priori basis: a society with generations of destabilized families and few inherited norms of governance and behavior may become even more unstable if one of the few truly biological stabilizing institutions, parenthood, becomes less common or covers a shorter window of a person’s lifespan. That is, parenthood often creates “stakes” for people encouraging them to pursue stability and longer-term investments. If we uniformly lower fertility but haven’t addressed other social problems, we may not accomplish much.
Now, lower fertility probably does unambiguously boost womens’ educational attainment and improve equality. But then again, better womens’ educational attainment and greater gender equality also lowers fertility. When we try to tease out causality, the best research suggests that both causal effects exist. As Western societies are experiencing now, we really do not know how low this cycle can push fertility rates.
But really, is Africa’s big problem excessive fertility?
The truth is, I don’t think there are that many development scholars who would rank high fertility as a leading problem. It is usually better seen as a symptom of other problems: poorly managed urbanization, political instability, unequal gender norms, lack of education, poverty, high mortality, disease, etc. When you list Africa’s problems, you shouldn’t list high fertility. You should list these other things. If a city is growing so fast the government can’t keep up with infrastructure needs, the problem is not “the existence of humans,” the problem is “bad governance.” High fertility may contribute to some problems (political instability) while improving others (economic growth).
Furthermore, a given degree of fertility has different effects depending on how it is organized. 4 kids per women may create a lot of instability if they are all abandoned in the street, 2 die, and 2 grow up outside of any kind of organized social system. 4 kids per women may be really good for a society if they are raised in an extended kinship network, 1 or 2 get good educations, 1 manages the ancestral lands, and 1 emigrates and sends home remittances.
Look, 7 kids per women is a lot. It would be hard to sustain a modern economy where half your workforce was out of the market doing that much reproductive labor, and it would be hard for most families to make the k-rate investments in kids necessary for success in a global economy at those levels. But many African countries with high TFRs have seen rapid development, poverty alleviation, and have gotten their fertility rates to more managable levels. And for the African countries floating around 2.5–4.5 children per women, the reality is that other factors like “absence of war” or “natural resources” or “degree of colonial exploitation” or “government corruption” are way more important for explaining prosperity.
So Is It Civilizational?
Macron’s argument that Africa faces “civilizational” challenges is an odd duck. Usually we see such claims made about clashing groups like Russia and the West, or the Middle East, or India and China. It’s rare to see it applied to Africa in such a sense. Sub-Saharan Africa in particular has quite large Christian populations who speak European languages and dress in Western styles, so we simply cannot be talking about “civilization” here in a the same sense in which someone might describe the “Arab World” as a civilization, or the “Anglosphere” as a civilization, or even “Christendom.”
So we must ask, what on earth does Macron mean by “civilizational”? Here’s a translation of the full quote:
So basically, what he means by “civilizational” is what development economists would call “institutional.” He means that poor democratic norms, a history of coups and civil wars, the existence of robust black markets, the presence of violent anti-state groups and transnational organizations, the lack of politically legitimate nationalisms, all of these make it hard to do effective development work. That’s… that’s totally true and reasonable. You try building roads in a warzone; it really is hard!
A growing body of research is showing that international aid sometimes harms the countries it aims to help, not least by enabling corruption and free-riding. Now, I don’t think that’s a reason to abandon international aid, but the point is that Macron is completely right to push back against the “Just give Africa money” crowd. African countries already receive large amounts of international aid directly or indirectly, and indeed, Africa is experiencing real growth, but the obstacles facing the continent are not solely monetary. They often are institutional.
It doesn’t matter how much money you give, if a state does not value the lives of 1/3 of its people because they are racially or ethnically different, or because they were on the wrong side of a civil war, or because they are associated with the old colonial regime, or because they refuse to pay a bribe, you’re going to have a limited impact.
Being an optimist about development, I think that Africa’s time is coming, indeed very well nigh. As population growth slows around the rest of the world, western countries will slowly come to recognize what has always been true: Africa’s greatest resource is not oil or metal or cotton, nor gold or ivory, nor cheap labor, nor expropriable land; it is the ingenuity and creativity of its people. In the decades to come, we will all have cause to be thankful for African fecundity. I suspect Macron wasn’t meaning to argue that development was impossible either. He clearly misspoke and could perhaps benefit from explaining himself a bit more, but his basic argument here is not only correct but a fairly consensus view among developed- and developing-world practitioners today. Cash alone won’t solve much.
Macron was incorrect about African fertility; it is in steady decline on most of the continent, and only one country on the continent fits his description. He was also wrong to call African problems civilisationnel; the word he should have said was probably something more like institutionnel.
But seriously people if you just read the whole comment that he’s making it’s not ambiguous what he’s talking about, and it isn’t that controversial. Now, was it prudent for the Former Colonial Oppressor to step up and point out the flaws of the Formerly Colonially Oppressed? You’ll have to make your own judgment on that. But in terms of just the facts, it’s fairly clear Macron wasn’t making some kind of Huntingtonian critique of African civilization qua its African-ness, he was arguing that economic development depends upon local institutions and reliable state partners as much as on the quantity of relief dollars. And to be honest, that’s something more people probably need to understand.
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I’m a native of Wilmore, Kentucky, a graduate of Transylvania University, and also the George Washington University’s Elliott School. My real job is as an economist at USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service, where I analyze and forecast cotton market conditions. I’m married to a kickass Kentucky woman named Ruth.
My posts are not endorsed by and do not in any way represent the opinions of the United States government or any branch, department, agency, or division of it. My writing represents exclusively my own opinions. I did not receive any financial support or remuneration from any party for this research.
