Africa’s babies: Population boom traps kids in poverty, women in childbearing

Posted on December 13, 2009
Filed Under 1 |

…

Although it’s frequently portrayed as a continent decimated by epidemics, starvation and war, Africa is gripped by one of the greatest population explosions ever recorded. Over the past 60 years, while birth rates in the rest of the developing world declined by half, Africa’s population quadrupled to 1 billion, an epic baby boom that threatens to trap a generation of children in poverty and strangle economic progress across the world’s neediest continent.

Driven largely by low rates of contraception use and social pressures to have big families, sub-Saharan African women bear 5.3 children each on average, compared with 2.1 in the United States. The continent is producing a child every second, and by 2050 its population will reach 2 billion, projects the Population Reference Bureau, a demographic research center in Washington.

Nearly half of Africa’s people are 15 or younger, a youth bulge that will struggle to find jobs and support its own children, and perhaps condemn the continent to more disillusionment and violence.

In the sprawling slums of tin and mud that snake through Nairobi, the booming capital of Kenya, families of six, eight, even 10 or more children survive on one simple meal a day as jobless parents struggle to keep up with creeping food prices. Many days, they don’t eat at all.

In war-torn Somalia and Congo, which are among the fastest-growing countries in the world, millions of children are being raised in refugee camps or makeshift shelters fashioned from cloth and sticks. Schools are poor or nonexistent, and chores as simple as fetching firewood can be death sentences.

In Mozambique, a nation at peace but blighted by poverty, teenage girls are pressed into marriage, a practice that eases the burden on their large families but cuts short their education and shoves them into motherhood before they’re ready.

In parts of West Africa, overwhelmed parents are sending young boys such as Ghaddafi to fend for themselves in hostile cities. Under the guise of an Islamic education, teachers are forcing these boys to beg for their survival, a modern-day Oliver Twist story played out by the tens of thousands in the bustling streets and sinister back alleys of places such as Kano.

“It’s a sign of the disintegration of the social fabric and the huge pressure on families,” said John F. May, the World Bank’s lead population researcher for Africa.

“People are making choices they don’t want to make. It will lead to a lot of nasty things.”

No one knows what the future holds for all these new Africans.

On a continent in which most people still grow the food they eat, will population growth create impossible demands on agriculture and ravage the environment as families try to extract ever more from the land?

Or will nations adapt, build schools, health systems and economies to match their growing numbers, and avert disaster?

What’s clear is that “this is the area of the world that, it’s fair to say, can least afford … a population explosion,” said Carl Haub, a senior demographer at the Population Reference Bureau.

By 2050, Nigeria is expected to vault past Bangladesh and Brazil to become the world’s sixth-most-populous nation.

In dust-choked Kano, the largest city in the predominantly Muslim north, children are everywhere. In the afternoons, following the midday Islamic prayer, they surge in the hundreds from dun-colored mosques and collect like droplets in dirt parking lots, the only adults around those who emerge from offices and storefronts to shoo them away.

The average woman here has seven children, according to national statistics. Among the Hausa, the main ethnic group, a cold-eyed reckoning of the burden that too many offspring can create hasn’t overpowered the traditional belief that children represent wealth — and a safety net for parents in old age.

“If you’re poor, the idea of having a small family doesn’t even arise,” said Adamu Kiyawa, who runs a nonprofit group for street kids.

more…

http://www.macon.com/news/story/951599.html