Africa’s Behind Global Population Growth As It Hits Eight Billion Mark This Month!

the longer people live, the more time they have to be counted, the report showed. And, as expected, the COVID-19 pandemic has had an effect on population change, the UN report added, suggesting further that human population could grow to around 8.5 billion in 2030, and to 9.7 billion in 2050, before reaching a peak of around 10.4 billion people during the 2080s. The population is expected to remain at that level until 2100.

The United Nation’s latest global population projection predicts there will be eight billion people on the planet this month and that the population will gradually increase to 8.5 billion by 2050 and to more than 10 billion by 2080. That growth will come with significant economic and environmental implications. The projected growth is not evenly spread across the world. Some regions, including Eastern and Southeastern Asia, are expected to shrink in population, while North America and Europe are expected to grow at very low rates. The bulk of the population growth is expected to come from sub-Saharan Africa and Central and Southeastern Asia. The move past the 8 billion mark masks the fact that globally, the population is growing at its slowest rate since the 1950s. Two-thirds of all people currently live in regions where the fertility rate, measured in births per woman, has fallen below the replacement rate of 2.1. 

In many cases, those falling rates are driven in part by government policies. Growth will be most concentrated among eight countries: the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and the United Republic of Tanzania. Of those eight, the countries in sub-Saharan Africa will account for more than half of the world’s population increase over the next 30 years, creating what U.N. officials called a potential “demographic dividend,” with the share of working-age adults, defined as those between 26 and 64 years of age, rising as a share of the population.