How unusual is Africa's demography? If you take a selection of countries, from Algeria and Tunisia in the north to Botswana and South Africa in the south, you may answer: not that unusual. In the early 1960s those nations had fertility rates of between 5.5 and 7.5, meaning the average woman there could expect to have that number of children during her lifetime. That was about the same as fertility in Brazil, China, Indonesia and Mexico at the time. Now, all the countries have similar fertility rates of between 1.5 and 3.0. The main difference is that the Asian and Latin American nations saw their fertility decline at a fairly steady pace over the past 50 years, whereas the African ones saw their fertility stay high until the mid-1980s, then fall sharply.
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