Topic: Demographic Traps (High, Low, & Minority-Majority Fertility Differences)

What Future for the Western Sahel?

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The Region’s Demography and Its Implications by 2045 (Atlantic Council, 2021)

By Richard Cincotta and Stephen Smith

The 6 states of the Western Sahel, northern Nigeria, and the Sahel climatic zone.

The Western Sahel—a region stretching from Senegal and Mauritania to Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Chad, and including the twelve sharia law states of northern Nigeria—is in a demographic impasse. Rather than yielding an economic dividend, the conditions spawned by the region’s persistently youthful, rapidly growing, high-fertility populations overwhelm the capabilities of state-run services, generate extensive urban slum conditions, slow if not stall economic and social progress, and aggravate ethnic tensions. Decades of exposure to these mutually reinforcing conditions have undermined the legitimacy of central governments and rendered the region’s states vulnerable to the spread of Islamic populism and regime instability. For more …..

To view the report online: go here.  

To view the Executive Summary, go to the Atlantic Council website

To download the report in .pdf format: download here

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Emulating Botswana’s Fertility Transition

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“Emulating Botswana’s Approach to Reproductive Health Services Could Speed Development in the Sahel”

This new web essay (on the NSB website <click here>) reviews research that uses the relatively rapid changes in Botswana’s age-specific fertility rates to produce a “Botswana historic fertility variant” and applies this projection to the populations of countries in the Western Sahel—a contiguous cluster of states with populations that remain at the early stages of the fertility transition. For these high-fertility countries, projections of this variant (up to the year 2050) fall roughly around the TFR trajectory the UN low fertility variant.


Figure.  Declines in Fertility Across Women’s Age Groups in Botswana, Niger, and Mali from 1980–85 to 2015–20. In Botswana, girls’ education and a quality family planning program helped adolescents postpone childbearing and helped older women avoid the risks associated with unwanted middle-age pregnancy (Data source: UN Pop. Div., 2019 Rev.)

This exercise provides a glimpse of what could possibly be achieved in some states in tropical Africa by emulating Botswana’s efforts to ramp up access to family planning, to decrease the frequency of teen pregnancies, and to increase girls’ educational attainment. However, the essay notes how different the Sahelian countries are from Botswana—a well-governed, resource-endowed southern African country with a relatively small, urbanized (>65%) population (2.3 million)—and thus the formidable challenges those differences present in attempting to replicate the pace of Botswana’s fertility transition.



Figure.  UN Population Division’s High, Medium, and Low Fertility Variants for Niger and Mali vs. Botswana Historical Fertility Variant (BHFV). In both cases, applying Botswana’s age-specific pattern of fertility declines would produce a projection roughly similar to the current UN low fertility variant. (Data Source: UN Pop. Div., 2019 Rev. & author’s research)

For the full essay, go to the NSB website <click here>

Or, download the essay <click here to download>

Which Demographic “End of History”?

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Dec. 9, 2019
[Among the top 5 New Security Beat Posts, December 2019]

Demography’s theoretical end-state is a set of hard-to-escape conditions typified by low and often sub-replacement levels of fertility, large proportions of retirees, and an aging workforce—an endpoint that the National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends reports refer to as post-maturity. The shift toward post-maturity is so unrelenting in parts of Europe and East Asia that some analysts imagine humanity plunging globally into post-maturity. However, this scenario, which I call “Post-mature World,” is looking much less likely than its non-endpoint alternative (see Figure 1), a chronically demographically “Polarized World.”

To visit the complete essay on the New Security Beat website, click HERE. Or, download the essay HERE.


Maps.  The age-structural phases of countries in Europe and in parts of Africa and Asia, 2015 & 2035 (projected). Maps represent the UN Population Division’s current estimates of median ages for 2015 and projections for 2035 (UN medium fertility variant). By 2035, most of Europe’s states will likely have advanced into post-maturity, whereas in the Sahel and tropics of Africa, countries will probably still be in the youthful phase of the age-structural transition. 

Figure 1.  Post-mature World and its alternative Polarized World, showing the Global Trends four-phase schema representing the path of the age-structural transition. Black arrows indicate the transition’s path and identify the two hard-to-escape demographic conditions, the youthful and post-mature phases. In a Post-mature World, countries age and their populations eventually decline. In a Polarized World, human population continues to grow in the youthful regions, stimulating increased migration to nearby states and to more mature regions.

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Sub-Saharan Africa: Looking Toward the Demographic Window

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Over the past 25 years, economic and political demographers have focused on documenting the improvements in state capacity and political stability that have been realized in the wake of fertility declines in much of East Asia, Latin America, and most recently in the Maghreb of North Africa (Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria). Nonetheless, foreign affairs, defense and intelligence analysts still seem confused over when and where this demographic dividend should occur—and whether the youthful, low-income states of Sub-Saharan Africa are due to experience the dividend’s economically favorable age structures anytime soon. Because two very different development narratives vie for these analysts’ attention, their confusion is not that surprising.

     In this essay, I discuss the concept of “the demographic window” and compare economists’ perspectives on sub-Saharan Africa to that of political demographers.  I also identify 4 groups of countries in sub-Saharan Africa that have very different schedules for reaching the demographic window (and thus reaching the World Bank’s upper middle income category and other development milestones). For the entire essay, posted in the Woodrow Wilson Center’s New Security Beat, see this page.

Download this New Security Beat essay on Sub-Saharan Africa’s Demographic Window .

Political Demography in the NIC’s Global Trends publications

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Early advances in age-structural political demography were pioneered within the (U.S.) National Intelligence Council’s Long-range Analysis Unit (now called “Strategic Futures”). That work has continued through collaborations between the NIC and political demographers. Some of the NIC’s political demography products are featured in three of hte NIC’s quadrennial strategic foresight series, entitled Global Trends.

Political demography can be found in the following sections in these 3 Global Trends publications, beginning in 2008:

Global Trends 2025, A Transformed World (published 2008):  Chapter 2: the Demographics of Discord, pp. 19-26.

Global Trends 2030, Alternative Worlds (published 2012): MEGATREND 3, Demographic Patterns, pp. 20-29.

Global Trends: Paradox of Progress (published 2016): People, pp. 161-166.