This thread is inspired by this one on family size.
In this village we have some guys who like bemoaning the fact that Kenyans are over-reproducing and making dire predictions about our future as a nation.
However, they don’t seem to realise that times have changed. The calculations our parents and grandparents made when having kids involved some of the kids dying and not reaching adulthood, and how many hands you have to work the farm.
Nowadays, especially after urbanisation, kids are no longer an asset but a liability. Most of us naturally want to limit the babies we have because honestly they are expensive. Couple that with reasonably good healthcare that leaves us confident that the few babies we have will not die in childhood, and you have a birthrate that has been decreasing (from an average of 8 kids per woman to today’s 4).
The reason our population is still growing is not because of birthrates, but because fewer people are dying once they are born. No matter what we think, we are living longer on average than our grandparents.
Which brings me to what we should be worried about. Kenya has a very big youthful population which is either unemployed or underemployed. Any decent government should be very concerned, because we won’t have such a youth boon forever.
It will not be many years before our population begins aging. (By the way China’s population is already beginning to age, it turns out the one child policy was not a good idea).
The problem will thus become one of high dependency in a population, since the young kids and old people depend on there being enough people of working age to support their pension schemes. Once we start running out of energetic youth, wazee watakipata.
Why do you think some Western countries are so obsessed with getting their people to reproduce? They even offer them generous paid leave. Na bado hawataki kuzaa. Look at Sweden and Japan.
I was reading a book called Empty Planet, where the author was projecting that the world population will probably never reach 10 billion people, and would in fact start decreasing at some point after 2050. Stuff like urbanisation and female empowerment means that people have other things besides babies they want to spend their money on.
And with a critical mass of people reproducing below the replacement rate of about 2.1 babies per woman, most of earth kutaanza kukaa kama Japan. It will be weird that as a species we will have removed all natural obstacles to our population growth, but seemingly voluntarily reduce ourselves. It remains to be seen though.