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Obstacles to progress

Challenges

Labor Force Growth and the Economy
The "demographic window" for favorable development opens approximately when the
population under age 15 falls below 30% of the total population, and the proportion of people

65 and older is still under 15%. Unfortunately, most tropical sub-Saharan African countries are
far from this point, and with high fertility and falling infant mortality, they are not closing in on

it. Almost all tropical African countries, including "good" performers like
Kenya and Rwanda, are at 40 to 50% of their population aged 0–14.
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Politics, Fragility, and Instability

Africa's politics are famous for instability. Whether it is the hundreds of military coups that
have taken place in African countries since independence, or the civil wars and genocides that

swept across central, west Africa and Algeria in the 1990s and the multiple rebellions that have
occurred in western Africa since 2000, the continent has been a byword for political instability.
By 2010, there was some hope that Africa was turning a corner, and that states such as

Tanzania, Botswana, Mozambique, Rwanda, South Africa, Ethiopia, Ghana, Uganda and Zambia
were leading the continent toward more stable and democratic government.38 The uprisings in

2010–2011 in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt were greeted with much hope as heralding an end to
dictators and the spread of democracy. But by 2018, it had become clear that many of these
states have joined the global trend toward the reassertion of strongman, autocratic rule. Only

Ghana, Botswana, and perhaps Tunisia are maintaining their path to stable democracy.
***
Numerous scholars have demonstrated that states with large youth bulges and sustained

population growth suffer from a variety of political pressures 193 . Whether it is the difficulties of
providing jobs, affordable food, adequate housing, controlling inflation, or policing sprawling
cities, governments are hard pressed to be responsive to the needs of rapidly growing

populations, often falling into debt through the costs of subsidies and bloated government
payrolls. Fights over resources among military or ethnic or regional factions are rendered more

likely and more severe by the ready availability of young men to join factional struggles, as the
young are both more drawn to ideological extremists and are more available for protest and
rebellion, being less tied to jobs and responsibilities. Conflict, or the threat of conflict,

promotes the seizure of power by autocratic leaders.
***
In fact, in these decades [1970s to the 1990s], countries in which 60% or more of the
population was under 30 had more than four times a higher risk of experiencing outbreaks of

violent civil conflict. That age structure still characterizes almost all of sub-Saharan Africa
today.