According to the UN, the global number of children aged under 5 has already peaked and is likely to fall for the rest of the century. But the number in sub-Saharan Africa will continue to grow until 2070.
Note: This article first appeared in The Wednesday Letter 206 earlier this month. Please subscribe to the substack to receive all Wednesday Letter postings including Geopolitics on Mondays and Twelve Charts This Week on Fridays.
How many children aged under 5 are there in the world? And is that number growing or falling? According to the UN’s “medium variant” estimate, it rose until 2017 when it reached 690.4 million, and has been falling ever since. The late Hans Rosling called this ‘Peak Child’.
The UN has several demographic scenarios for the future. The most probable is what it calls the “medium variant”. There are also, among many more, a “high variant” and a “low variant” derived from assumptions of higher and lower fertility. Here, in the first chart, is the global number of children aged under 5, with each of the three variants. According to the most probable scenario (the medium variant), that number will more or less flatline above 650 million until 2060 after which it will fade down gradually to 560 million in 2100. The less probable high and low variants are also shown, with the first racing to nearly 1.1 billion and the second falling to 250 million by 2100.
It is important to underscore that all three variants assume a continuing decline in fertility (the number of children per woman) around the world, in particular in sub-Saharan Africa where it remains elevated. Here is the same chart for sub-Saharan Africa. Under all three variants, the number of children aged under 5 will continue to grow until at least 2050 (low variant), 2070 (medium) or beyond 2100 (high). The numbers themselves are quite large, 185 million today, and 250 million in 2070 per the medium variant.
Sub-Saharan Africa is the most demographically dynamic region of the world. Europe is the least dynamic. Here is the chart for Europe. The number of children aged under 5 peaked in 1962. Note the big dip in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union. European fertility has been well below replacement for a long time, which means that both the overall population and the working-age population will shrink. This retrenchment is not all due to Eastern Europe. The rest of Europe is also in demographic decline. The numbers are relatively small, 35 million children under 5 today and 25 million by 2100 per the medium variant.
Now here is something to make you pause. If we take the last two charts and combine them in a ratio of sub-Saharan to European children aged under 5, we see that this ratio (the number of sub-Saharan children under 5 for every European) rose from less than 1 to 1 in 1950 to 5.3 to 1 in 2023. Under the medium variants for both regions, it is expected to rise to 7.6 by 2050 and 9 by 2075. The consequences of this change will be significant. We are seeing them already with increased migration numbers from south to north.
If you are wondering about North America (includes the US and Canada but not Mexico), here is the chart. The number will remain essentially flat between 20 and 22 million. However, this does not account sufficiently for illegal immigration. It is likely that the number of children aged under 5 will rise to above 25 million in some future years. All the same, North America numbers are small compared to the boom that is taking place in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia.
