Countering ICPD25: Africa’s Overpopulation Narrative a “fallacy”, a “myth”

“This agenda of saying, oh, we are so populated, is a fallacy,” the Regional President of Pax Romana International Catholic Movement for Intellectuals and Cultural Affairs (Pax –ICMICA), Dr. Frederick Wamalwa said. 

“When you talk about rights generally to reproductive health, it is sort of connected to this issue of population, which is the development,” he told ACI Africa, Tuesday on the sidelines of the Pro-life and Family Friendly Side Events, that has been organized to counter the ICPD25 agenda. 

“So, the main conference (ICPD25) is drawing participants from the international development community. It's also drawing participants from civil society organizations, research institutes, but also government officials, planners,” he said and continued, “especially for national government planners, economists, their interest is how do we plan finite resources we have to be able to benefit everyone?” 

“And their interest is to have a population growing at a decreasing rate,” he added. 

He further explained the importance of having large populations saying, “Population is not an issue. For me, in fact population is good. Because population also creates demand for production. If you are producing, then you need people to consume, you need people to purchase. It is the population.” 

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Rather than depopulating, the Kenyan economist advised, “Africa needs to focus on population growth because “we need to grow the population of working people, which is very important for us.” 

“If you go to some of the European countries, they don't have the working age population. So, they have this larger population of old people who are no longer working,” he added, “We don't want to be caught up with what we're seeing there.”

“The honest truth is that Africa is not overpopulated,” the director of the Foundation for African Cultural Heritage and the African representative for the World Congress of Families, Dr. Theresa Okafor also said.

For Dr. Okafor, the narrative of Africa being overpopulated is a “myth” that is “worrisome.”

“It's really worrisome. You know, this myth about overpopulation,” she said and added, “If you look at the northern hemisphere, they bought the arguments of the world going to be overpopulated and already begun to put in place structures to reduce their population, “now the population has imploded and now they're having to deal with a crisis situation because their depopulation has reached a non-replacement level.” 

“How then are we (Africa) overpopulated when our landmass is much more than the UK, US, China, India and the rest of Europe, our landmass is much more,” the Nigerian representative for Africa the World Congress of Families added.

In the considered view of Dr. Wamalwa and Dr. Okafor, Africa needs to focus more on empowering its citizens than depopulating its continent. 

As Dr. Wamalwa argued, “From a developing country point of view, population shouldn't be a problem. What we need to be stressed with is being able to give these young people who are coming, joining the labour market the right skills to be able to be productive in the labour market.”

For him, countries in Africa need to have clear “policies around education, policies around health, policies around labour market, policies around social protection,” among other relevant policies.

According to Dr. Okafor, “Africa is too rich to be poor. We have the resources to get around to the population. We have enough resources to change our medical facilities, our health facilities, to empower our youths.”

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She explained, “When I say empower our youths I mean, providing employment for our youth and showing that they have the right kind of education that would enable them to become creators of wealth and not necessarily to be employed, but people who get to employ others and create jobs for others.”

In the days leading to ICPD25 Conference, the Vatican and the African Union (AU)  made known their concerns, with the former withdrawing from the summit and the latter withdrawing its initial document.

“We withdrew the document that should have been tabled as the ICPD as Africa's position. So, we stopped as the African Union who are quite alert and we stopped it because it didn't go through the due process of the policy organs of the Union,” Amb. Emmanuel Mwamba told ACI Africa.

Magdalene Kahiu is a Kenyan journalist with passion in Church communication. She holds a Degree in Social Communications from the Catholic University of Eastern Africa (CUEA). Currently, she works as a journalist for ACI Africa.