This article titled “Fact check: how many people live in Africa?” was written by Kate Wilkinson and Sintha Chiumia for Africa Check and Maeve Shearlaw, for theguardian.com on Wednesday 22nd October 2014 11.18 UTC
‘A white farmer is killed every five days in South Africa’. ‘Earlier this year Nigerian Islamists Boko Haram burnt 375 Christians alive’. ‘The Democratic Republic of the Congo is the rape capital of the world’.
What’s wrong with these statements? They are all false.
Those familiar with the continent might just shrug off yet more myths being reported as news, but there is an emerging team of fact checkers including BudgIT and Africa Check who want to put things right.
To accompany a story in the Guardian a few weeks ago we asked you to nominate a common misconception about Africa for us to look in to in more detail.
We chose JimNolan and Wild1’s questions about population: ‘how many people live in Africa?’ ‘How many are expected to live there in the next 10, 20 and 100 years?’
Is it possible to get a definitive answer? What factors stand in the way? We turned the questions over to Africa Check to investigate.
How many people live in Africa?
Current estimates suggest there are about 1.13 billion people on the continent. The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) puts Africa’s population at 1.132 bn. The US Population Reference Bureau’s (PRB) figure is 1.136bn and the World Bank says 1.13bn (but that excludes the Western Sahara).
How many people will live in Africa?
Projections for 2025 range from 1.397bn to 1.486bn. By 2050 the number of people in Africa is expected to increase by another billion and by 2100 the United Nations (UN) forecasts there will be 4.185bn people on the continent. These projections, known as medium variants, are the most reliable.
Statisticians also calculate low and high variants, which according to the UN are as low as 2.826bn by 2100, or as high as 6.007bn. Or if fertility rates remain constant 17.221bn.
How is it worked out?
Projections are pulled together from current population figures, migration data, mortality figures and fertility rates. Of the three, migration is the hardest to predict.
National census figures and health and demographic surveys are taken into account along with historical data. Population estimates are then calculated for every country and the estimates are aggregated for the continent.
It is important to be aware that census figures for many African countries are not always accurate. Sometimes current population estimates are based on old census data, little more than projections themselves.
Diego Iturralde from Statistics South Africa calls population projections “an educated guessing game”.
How accurate are the forecasts?
While population projections are an ‘educated guess’, they can can be surprisingly accurate. An evaluation of a series of United Nations population projections between the 1950s and 1990s found that all but one had a margin of error of less than four per cent.
The quality of data also poses problems. Some countries carry out very few censuses, and the accuracy of the ones they do do are doubtful, according to Rob Dorrington from the University of Cape Town.
For example, Eritrea, South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo all failed to conduct population censuses between 2005 and 2014.
In Nigeria the country’s census figures have been the subject of controversy for decades. Accusations of rigging date back to the 1950s and have continued unabated under military and civilian regimes.
Unrest and conflict and the cost of conducting a census can stand in the way of accuracy, as can weak civil registration systems, failing to record births and deaths correctly.
Are they still useful?
Given all the variables, population forecasts should not be seen as cast in stone, but as useful guides.
Iturralde argues that “the big picture is that the numbers must be used to inform what we can expect and what to plan [for]”. Dr Mady Biaye from UNFPA says: “populations will continue to grow. Every single person at every level of decision making should be planning for that.”
Anne Goujon from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis says: “In short, the long-range projections do not predict the future, they show different futures with some indication as to how to attain or avoid them.”
A full version of this article is available on Africa Check
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