In an Aging World, a Youthful Africa Steps Up

New York Times

28-01-2025

Much of the world is accustomed to thinking of Africa as an impoverished sideshow, accounting for only a small share of the world's population and G.D.P. — but what if that is poised to change?
Experts at the International Monetary Fund have argued that we are entering the 'African century.' I wouldn't go that far, but they are right to point to profound demographic and other shifts suggesting that Africa will play a far more important role in the world.
A few data points:
In an aging and perhaps enfeebled world, Africa will also be a continent of youth — arguably making it comparatively vigorous and more of a hotbed for entrepreneurship and for music and popular culture. In a sign of increasing cultural influence, Africans in recent years have won both the Booker Prize and the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Africans are shaping the French language, coining terms like 'wesh?' (meaning 'what's up?') and deuxième bureau (literally 'second office' but signifying 'mistress').
Yet it also seems plausible to me that Africa may gain relevance by becoming an increasing source of chaos, refugees and humanitarian crises.
I was thinking about all this on a trip through Africa in December that highlighted strengths and weaknesses alike. In a village called Marfuti in southern Madagascar, I squeezed into the hut of a woman named Joroaze and her eight children, at least three of them acutely malnourished.
Climate change appears to have made drought much more frequent in the region, destroying crops and spreading hunger. To fetch water, Joroaze must make a three-hour round-trip hike to the nearest well. She showed me that the only food in her hut was a bucket of fruit collected from wild cactus.
It is not clear to me how villagers like her can improve their lot if drought conditions continue or worsen.
'When I was a little girl, there was enough rain,' a 60-year-old village elder, Ratsolo, told me. 'Now the rain has gone.'
I asked people in this and other villages if they knew the name of the American president. None did, and some had never even heard of the United States. Yet village children appear to be starving in part because of American carbon emissions — the United States accounts for one-fifth of cumulative carbon emitted worldwide.
In other parts of Africa conditions are even worse. The Peace Research Institute Oslo reported last June that the number of conflicts in Africa had nearly doubled over a decade, to 28.
A few months ago I was on the Sudan-Chad border, covering the civil war and famine that are devastating the Sudanese people. Likewise, the impoverished Sahel belt of West Africa — countries like Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso — is torn apart by terrorism and conflict, such that it could become a vast region of chaos. I first backpacked through the Sahel as a law student in 1982, and in many respects it is worse off today than it was then.
Congo is near to my heart, partly because of my reporting there over the decades. In 1960, its G.D.P. per capita was more than two times what South Korea's was. But Congo's G.D.P. per capita tumbled, and today South Korea is an industrialized democracy not comparable to Congo.
As recently as the early 1990s, sub-Saharan Africa was richer per capita than China; now China is far better off. Indeed, the gap is widening between Africa and the rest of the world. Africa accounted for 14 percent of the world's poor in 1990, but The Economist calculates that if current trends continue, it will account for 80 percent in 2030.
Foreign direct investment in Africa is minuscule: Tiny Central America attracts about as much capital as all of Africa.
China's outreach to Africa led the United States to pay more attention to the continent for a time, but now China is retrenching and the Trump administration is suspending aid programs and has ended assistance to some women's health initiatives. This will cause enormous hardship, and there could be more: In his first term, Donald Trump reportedly proposed shutting down all American embassies across Africa.
Yet if Africa's challenges are enormous, plenty in Africa also gives me hope. Over the decades, I've visited 53 of its 54 countries, and today I see enormous gains in education and the emergence of leaders ready to pull the continent forward.
The Seychelles was long a one-party state with rigid controls that devastated the economy. But in 2008 a financial crisis forced change, and since then the country has built a modern economy, nurtured tourism and attracted digital nomads (it's hard to beat a beautiful island with favorable tax policies).
I dropped in on the Seychelles' vice president, Ahmed Afif, and he was sometimes scathing about much of the continent's leadership. He said that African leaders used colonialism or the slave trade as excuses for their own failures.
'Our focus now must not be on just blaming the past,' he said. 'Our focus must be how to transform our world.'
That was a theme I heard often on my recent trip, particularly from young Africans. The continent is youthful but its leadership is often elderly — President Paul Biya of Cameroon is about to turn 92 and has been in power for 42 years — and young people are desperate for better leadership.
Huge anti-government protests erupted in Kenya over the summer, forcing President William Ruto to back off a tax proposal and to fire his cabinet.
'We feel betrayed by the older generation,' Namayi Auma, 24, told me in the Kibera slum where she grew up. Her oldest sister, 33, got no formal education at all, but Namayi has just graduated from the University of Nairobi and aims to put her schooling to use.
'Education has now become our weapon of this generation,' she said. 'The opportunities we see in other countries, we want them here.
She added, 'We are not patient.'
Can these impatient young people bring about change? I don't know.
In 2019, Sudanese citizens braved torture, rape and massacres to overthrow their despotic government. Yet for all the protesters' courage and vision, the military seized power just two years later and the country has since been enveloped in a horrific civil war.
Yet even in the face of militias committing atrocities, Sudanese civil society has organized grass roots 'emergency response rooms' that were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
I'm awed by the work of nonprofit leaders like Valentino Achak Deng, a South Sudanese 'lost boy' who was the protagonist of Dave Eggers's best-selling book 'What Is the What?' With money from the book, Deng started an excellent high school for children across South Sudan and has managed to keep it going through civil war there.
Likewise in Kenya, a charismatic young man named Kennedy Odede — who had almost no formal education until Wesleyan University accepted him on a scholarship — started a program in his Nairobi slum that now encompasses a girls' school, a skills training program, a clinic and a high-tech water treatment and distribution program.
'Our generation's slogan is, 'We are not our parents!'' Odede told me. 'Something is happening. Africa is changing. Youth are the present and future. Young people are fed up.'
This generation does seem different, and far more empowered.
One of the most successful African countries is Mauritius, a prosperous multiethnic haven for tech and investment companies (also with beautiful island beaches). At African Leadership University on Mauritius, students come from across Africa to learn how to lift up their countries and the continent.
Some of the students made a trip to Silicon Valley in California and upon their return started their own tech entrepreneurship program, leading to 26 start-ups by students.
'In 10 years, I'd like to be running my own company,' Nomboh Evans Kunchu, a student from Cameroon, told me, and he has already written a book about Gen Z entrepreneurs in Africa.
Still, one factor that tempers my optimism is experience. Back in 2012, when much of Africa was thriving and the I.M.F. was predicting that between 2011 and 2015 Africa would account for seven of the 10 fastest-growing economies in the world, I wrote a column headlined 'Africa on the Rise.'
In retrospect, the continent's prospects began to dim at approximately the moment that column went online.
There's much debate about why so much of Africa lags behind the rest of the world, and colonialism is often cited. But to me the most important factor has been weak governance (which, in fairness, sometimes has roots in colonialism). Those countries that have enjoyed sustained strong leadership (like Botswana) have done well, but too many have been unstable kleptocracies.
'Our government is taking us down,' Diana Kasina, a 19-year-old Kenyan journalism student, told me. 'The British left problems, but that was a long time ago. If the roads have problems, that's not Britain's fault. That's our government's fault.'
Under this popular pressure, leadership is improving in some places. Highly educated figures are emerging.
A star in West Africa is Moinina David Sengeh, who grew up in Sierra Leone, attended Harvard, earned a Ph.D. from M.I.T. and then worked for I.B.M. Sengeh returned to Sierra Leone as chief innovation officer and then as minister of education oversaw a huge push to improve schooling in his country. Sengeh has since been promoted to chief minister of his country. In him, I see what better leadership could offer the continent.
Many people feel that the natural order is for America and Europe to dominate the world, but in historical terms that is a recent phenomenon going back just a few centuries. For most of history, Asia led the world in G.D.P. and population. Perhaps demography will now give Africa a turn to rise, finally.
It's difficult to generalize about Africa. But I suspect that the continent will become more important in our lives — I'm just not entirely sure whether that will be because of its successes or its struggles. Most likely, both.