Old World, Young Africa

The promise and the challenges of a rapidly urbanizing continent.

As the world grays, Africa blooms with youth. By 2050, one in four people on the planet will be African, a seismic change that is already starting to register.

You can hear it in the music the world listens to. You can see it in movies, fashion and politics. You can sense it in the entrepreneurial drive of young Africans — and the urgent scramble for jobs. You can see it in the waves of youth who risk all to migrate — and in the dilemmas of those who remain.

Astonishing change is underway in Africa, where the population is projected to nearly double to 2.5 billion over the next quarter-century — an era that will transform many African countries, and also radically reshape their relationship with the rest of the world.

Birthrates are tumbling in richer nations, creating anxiety about caring for aging societies. But Africa’s baby boom continues apace, fueling the youngest population on earth.

In 1950, Africans made up 8 percent of the world’s people. A century later, they will account for one-quarter of humanity and at least one-third of all young people ages 15 to 24, according to United

Nations forecasts.

The median age on the African continent is 19. In India, the world’s most populous country, it is 28. In China and America, it is 38.

The implications of this “youthquake,” as some call it, are immense yet likely to vary greatly across Africa, a continent of myriad cultures and some 54 countries that covers an area larger than China, Europe, India and the United States combined.

But its first signs are already here. It reverberates in the thrum of the continent’s ballooning cities, their hectic streets jammed with new arrivals, that make Africa the most rapidly urbanizing continent on earth.

It pulses in the packed stadiums of London or New York, where African musicians are storming the world of pop, and in the heaving megachurches of West Africa, where the future of Christianity is being shaped.

And it shows in the glow of Africa’s 670 million cellphones, one for every

second person on the continent — the dominant internet device used to move money, launch revolutions, stoke frustrations and feed dreams.

Young Africans are better educated than ever: 44 percent graduated from high school in 2020, up from 27 percent in 2000.

“It feels like the opportunities are unlimited for us right now,” said Jean-Patrick Niambé, a 24-year-old hip-hop artist from Ivory Coast.

Africa’s political reach is growing, too. Its leaders are courted at flashy summits by foreign powers that covet their huge reserves of the minerals needed to make electric cars and solar panels for the green revolution.

African leaders are spurning the image of victim and demanding a bigger say. In September, the African Union joined the Group of 20, the premier forum for international economic cooperation, taking a seat at the same table as the European Union.

Businesses are chasing Africa’s tens of millions of new consumers emerging every year, representing untapped markets for cosmetics, organic foods and even Champagne.

Its population of millionaires, the fastest growing on earth, is expected to double to 768,000 by 2027, the bank Credit Suisse estimates.

Africa has always been a young continent — only two decades ago, the median age was 17 — but never on such a scale. Within the next decade, Africa will have the world’s largest workforce, surpassing China and India. By the 2040s, it will account for two out of every five children born on the planet.

Experts say this approaching tide of humanity will push Africa to the fore of the most pressing concerns of our age, like climate change, the energy transition and migration.

Cultural Powerhouse

When Nigerian star Burna Boy stepped out before an adoring crowd at New York’s Citi Field this summer, he confirmed himself as pop royalty.

Weeks earlier, in London, he had filled an 80,000-capacity venue. In New York, he became the first African artist to sell out a U.S. stadium.

He sang his new single, “Sittin’ on Top of the World.”

It was yet another milestone for Afrobeats, a West African musical genre that is becoming a global sensation. Afrobeats songs were streamed more than 13 billion times on Spotify last year, up from 8 billion in 2021; the genre’s biggest hit, Rema’s “Calm Down,” was a fan phenomenon at the soccer World Cup in Qatar.

African fashion had its own shows in Paris and Milan. In Venice, Africa is the focus of this year’s Architectural Biennale. Last year, an architect from Burkina Faso won the prestigious Pritzker Prize. In 2021, Tanzania-born Abdulrazak Gurnah won the Nobel

Prize in literature.

Long viewed in the West as a niche interest — or worse, exotica — African culture has become the continent’s soft power and a source of hard cash.

The world’s fastest-growing music market is in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the main industry body. By 2030, Africa’s film and music industries could be worth $20 billion and create 20 million jobs, according to UNESCO estimates.

A Crisis in Jobs

Not long ago, technology was the big idea for enabling Africa to get out of poverty.

Startups sprouted in countries like Nigeria, South Africa and Morocco. Innovative technologies, like M-Pesa, brought mobile banking to tens of millions of people. Women-only coding schools emerged. Microsoft and Google established major centers in Kenya, the self-styled “Silicon Savannah” of East Africa. Optimists spoke of an “Africa rising.”

But while technology brought billions in investment, it failed dismally on one crucial front: creating jobs. Chronic unemployment, an old problem, is now a major crisis.

The continent’s working-age population — people ages 15 to 65 — will hit one billion in the next decade.

What will these one billion workers do?

“That’s a problem,” said Mo Ibrahim, a Sudanese-born telecommunications tycoon and philanthropist.

It is also a problem for the world, said Aubrey Hruby, an investor in Africa and an author of “The Next Africa.” She said, “After climate change, Africa’s jobs crisis will be a defining challenge of our era.”

Elsewhere, the answer was industrialization. In the 1970s and 1980s, when China, South Korea and Japan were the engines of population growth, their factories were filled with young people producing clothes, cars and TVs, bringing new affluence.

Africa is poorly positioned to repeat that feat. Other than South Africa and a handful of countries in North Africa, most of the continent has failed to industrialize. In fact, it is losing ground: Africa’s share of global manufacturing is smaller today than it was in 1980.

Infrastructure is an obstacle. Some 600 million Africans, or four in 10, lack electricity. Major roads and railways lead to the coasts, a legacy of extractive colonialism, which inhibits trade between countries.

Despite making up 18 percent of the global population,

Africa accounts for just 3 percent of all trade.

For legions of young Africans, that leaves only one option: Get out. Every year, tens of thousands of doctors, academics and other skilled migrants flee the continent. And the countries they leave behind depend on them to survive. In 2021, African migrants sent home $96 billion in remittances, three times more than the sum of all foreign aid, the African Development Bank found.

In fact, the majority of young migrants do not even leave the continent, moving instead to other countries in Africa. But the plight of those who gamble their lives to travel further — left to die in sinking boats in the Mediterranean Sea or stumbling through Central American jungle to reach the United States — has become a potent emblem of desperation.

Young Voters, Old Leaders

A youthful continent is run by old men. The average African leader is 63 years old; the oldest, President Paul Biya of Cameroon, is 90. Under their grip, democracy has fallen to its lowest point in decades.

Yet there is one key group that Africa’s gerontocrats have failed to win over: the alienated youth of their own nations.

“Our elites treat us like idiots,” Nourdine Aouadé, a lawyer and young political leader, said in Niger’s capital, Niamey, after a coup in August.

Most young Africans admire and desire democracy, numerous polls have found.

But disillusionment with politicians’ empty promises is giving rise to a new age of protest and to political activism, like performance artists focused on climate change.

The Draw of Militancy

While some take flight, others pick up a gun.

In the Sahel, the semiarid region bordering the Sahara that runs across the African continent, tens of thousands of teenagers have joined militant groups linked to al-Qaida and the Islamic State group. They bring havoc in their wake — thousands of civilians killed, five million forced from their homes, and destabilization that has led to military coups.

But the main driver of this powerful insurgency is not an extremist ideology or religious belief, according to a U.N. study of 1,000 former fighters from eight countries. Instead, the single biggest reason for joining a militant group was the simple desire to have a job.

The Sahel is the global center of extremist violence, accounting for 43 percent of all such deaths in 2022, according to the Global Terrorism Index. And it has the highest birthrates — on average seven children per woman in Niger and northern Nigeria, six in Mali and Chad, and five in Sudan and Burkina Faso.

High birthrates alone do not cause insurgencies. But they are a major accelerant when combined with poverty.

A warming planet is also a major factor, erasing livelihoods and driving people to desperation.

These factors are why many view the Sahel as the most worrisome manifestation of Africa’s “youthquake.”

The Hope of Women

One key to tackling that problem lies with teenage girls like Asiya Saidu.

Like many in Zaria, a Muslim-majority city in Nigeria, Saidu expected to be married by 14 and to have her first child soon after. Instead, she enrolled at the Center for Girls Education, a U.S.-funded program that has helped about 70,000 girls to stay in school and have smaller families.

Educating girls has an unusually large effect on family size in Africa because it delays the age of marriage and helps young women to space out their children, researchers have found.

Saidu, now 17, recently applied for nursing school.

“I do want to get married,” she said. But first, she said, “I want to be independent and learn to support myself.”