30 November 2015 - 04 December 2015
Johannesburg, South Africa

Demographic dividend in Africa: Prospects, opportunities and challenges

Anne Goujon will participate at the 7th African Population Conference and will present about training opportunities at IIASA and discuss collaborative possibilities.

Preschool class in South Africa © Monkey Business Images | Dreamstime

Preschool class in South Africa © Monkey Business Images | Dreamstime

The seventh African Population Conference will be jointly hosted by the Government of South Africa and the Union for African Population Studies (UAPS) between November 30 and 4 December 2015 on the theme "Demographic dividend in Africa: Prospects, opportunities and challenges". 

In conformity with its statutes and action plan, UAPS organizes a pan-African conference on population issues every four years in Africa. This conference has multiple objectives, notably:

  1. To give African researchers an opportunity to contribute to advances in universal science by presenting their significant work and ideals concerning population issues;
  2. To initiate a framework for exchange between researchers and political policymakers;
  3. To promote action that will better integrate the population variable in economic and social planning;
  4. To take advantage of this conference to identify new research paradigms in order to identify future challenges linked to population issues.

Under the title "Is stalled fertility in Africa a late consequence of stalled female education due to Structural Adjustment Programs in the 1980s?", IIASA scientist Anne Goujon will present research she conducted together with her colleagues from the World Population Program Wolfgang Lutz and Samir KC. The presentation will be part of Session 44: Theories of Contemporary Fertility Transitions on Tuesday, December 1, 11:00 - 12:30.

The conference will be held in Johannesburg, South Africa from November 30 to 4 December 2015. 

For more information please visit the event website.

Anne Goujon was also invited to give a presentation about training opportunities at IIASA and discuss collaborative possibilities at the National School of Government on 3 December 2015.

Presentation Abstract

Recent stalls in fertility decline have been observed in a few countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and no plausible common reason has been identified in the literature so far. The paper develops the hypothesis that these fertility stalls are partly associated with stalls in the progress of education among women of the relevant cohorts resulting from the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) during the 1980s. We descriptively link the change in the education composition of subsequent cohorts of young women in Sub-Saharan Africa and the recent fertility stalls, using reconstructed data on population by age, sex and level of education from the Wittgenstein Centre Data Explorer and fertility rates from the United Nations. If the descriptive findings are corroborated through more detailed cohort specific fertility analysis, it will have important implications for the projections of population growth in affected countries such as Nigeria.

    


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Last edited: 01 December 2015

CONTACT DETAILS

Anne Goujon

Program Director and Principal Research Scholar Population and Just Societies Program

Acting Research Group Leader and Principal Research Scholar Multidimensional Demographic Modeling Research Group - Population and Just Societies Program

Project information

Population Dynamics and Global Human Capital

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Education and crime in South Africa

International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)
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