The countries of the Western Sahel find themselves in the tightening grip of a set of mutually reinforcing crises. These include deepening seasonal food insecurity and surges of food-aid dependency, widening income inequalities, widespread childhood stunting, low levels of education attainment and pervasive unemployment, as well as acute political instability and a rapidly growing Islamist-led insurgency that has already displaced some 2.5 million people across the region. In our recent report, What Future for the Western Sahel? The Region’s Demography and Its Implications by 2045, (published by the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security), we argue that, unless the Sahelian states focus on reversing the underlying conditions that sustain high fertility—the cause of a persistently youthful and rapidly growing population—they will likely not be able to resolve these crises in the foreseeable future.  

Thirty-four years ago, Burkina Faso’s president, Thomas Sankara, was murdered. Only now are his alleged assassins on trial. Had he survived, the arid, landlocked country of more than 20 million people might well have taken a far different path to development.

In 2007, at the (U.S.) National Intelligence Council, a colleague and I set out to determine if we could forecast two distinct political phenomena, the rise and the demise of high levels of democracy. To guide our decade-long forecasts, we relied on a simple statistical model and a spreadsheet of demographic projections from the UN’s 2006 World Population Prospects data set. Now that the experimental period (from 2010 to 2020) has ended, we can look back and ask: How well did these forecasts perform? 

Rather than delve into issue opinion polling, or assess presidential campaign strategies, political demographers assume that political change is the predictable product of a set of mutually reinforcing social, economic, and demographic transitions, which can be tracked using data. But is this true in a country like the United States that has been in the advanced stages of these development transitions for decades? If these transitions are as important as demographers believe, could their variation among the 50 states explain the outcome of the recent U.S. presidential election? If so, what could they tell us about America’s electoral future?

Until several months ago, demographers regarded a youthful age structure as an unequivocally detrimental demographic characteristic. Where more than half of the population is younger than age 25, countries are unable to attain high levels of economic and human capital development and face an increased risk of some forms of civil conflict. Yet, so far, during the ongoing pre-vaccine stage of the COVID-19 pandemic, the most age-structurally mature countries have been hardest hit by the disease. These countries are generally urbanized, wealthy, well-educated, and include a large proportion of seniors. And, somewhat surprisingly—despite being equipped with advanced medical technologies—these countries are experiencing the highest rates of mortality from complications related to COVID-19.

The Western Sahel region—a cluster of arid, low-income countries stretching from Senegal, on Africa’s Atlantic coast, inland to Mauritania, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, and Chad—is home to the world’s most youthful populations. According to current UN Population Division estimates, about 57 percent of this six-country region’s population is 19 years old or younger. As security conditions deteriorate across the rural Sahel, governments in Europe and North Africa are taking notice of these countries’ demographic status—and for good reasons. Sustained population youthfulness (often called a “youth bulge”) contributes to low levels of educational attainment, joblessness and social immobility, and ultimately to rapid population growth, which tends to drive declines in per-capita availability of freshwater and other critical natural resources: factors that are associated with the risk of persistent violent conflict and represent powerful push factors for migration.

This year, 2018, marks the 60^th anniversary of a landmark publication by a pair of academic social scientists who first recognized the close relationship between population age structure (the distribution of a country’s population, by age) and development. In Population Growth and Development in Low Income Countries (Princeton U. Press, 1958), demographer Ansley Coale (1917-2002) and economist Edgar M. Hoover (1907-1992) theorized that eventual declines in fertility would transform developing-country age structures. Coale and Hoover demonstrated that these newly transformed age structures would exhibit larger shares of citizens in the working ages, and smaller shares of dependent children and seniors (Fig. 1). This transition, they argued, would someday help lift countries with youthful populations in Asia, Latin America, and Africa out of the low-income bracket.