While the pangolin’s thick overlapping scales protect it from predators such as lions, this animal is an easy mark for illegal wildlife traffickers. Image courtesy of the Tikki Hywood Foundation, Zimbabwe.

Acting on a tip, Nigerian customs operatives raided an apartment in the southwest city of Ikeja in February. Inside, they found some 4,400 pounds of pangolin scales, and 218 ivory tusks—and arrested a Chinese suspect, Ko Sin Ying, who lived there.

A few months earlier, at the other end of a well-worn trade route, Chinese customs officials made the largest-ever seizure of pangolin scales in the port of Shenzhen. They discovered an “empty” shipping container that had come in from Africa—stuffed with 13 tons of scales. They were packaged in bags that camouflaged their true contents beneath a veneer of charcoal. That haul had killed an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 animals, each about as big as a medium-sized dog.

Today, African leaders agree that Africa has a great opportunity to reap economic benefits from strategic investments made in the continent’s current large youthful population. The “demographic dividend” is the accelerated economic growth that can result from improved reproductive health, a rapid decline in fertility, and the subsequent shift in population age structure. With more people in the labor force and fewer children to support, a country has a window of opportunity—but only if the right social and economic investments and policies are made in health, education, governance, and the economy. 

Over the past 25 years, economic and political demographers have documented how declines in fertility rates have preceded improvements in state capacity, income, and political stability in much of East Asia, Latin America, and, most recently, in the Maghreb region of North Africa (Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria). Nonetheless, social scientists still debate over where and when this “demographic dividend” will occur in the youthful, low-income countries of sub-Saharan Africa.  Elizabeth Leahy Madsen of the Population Reference Bureau and I find that, for most youthful countries—like those in sub-Saharan Africa—changes in population age structure provide a means to gauge the timing of their future development.

“Investing in youth is a recipe for success,” said Elizabeth Dawes Gay, senior policy analyst at the Population Reference Bureau (PRB), during a webinar on June 22, 2017, organized by PRB’s PACE project on the connections between the population, health, environment (PHE) approach to international development, and achieving the demographic dividend.

Cities in sub-Saharan Africa are growing rapidly. But will this lead to economic growth? According to a recent World Bank report, Africa’s Cities: Opening Doors to the World, the low level of regional and international trade is one of the main reasons why African cities are relatively poor.

Scientists agree that many countries in tropical, subtropical, and arid regions should expect changes to water availability and supply from climate change. The U.S. intelligence community has likewise warned of water-driven challenges not only for countries directly affected by water changes, but indirectly to various U.S. national security interests. Perhaps not surprisingly then, the popular literature has been quite clear about prophesizing wars over water.