Africa in numbers - how its countries compare
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Version 0 of 1. Africa is a continent of 1.1bn people, over 50 countries and thousands of different languages. Comparisons between countries are always difficult, more so in a continent so diverse. We have plotted seven alternative indicators for each of the countries below which provide some sense of life on the ground as well as a general barometer of each nation’s development. For example, a high proportion of the workforce being in the service sector suggests that the country is largely dependent on high-skilled jobs such as banking, which has grown rapidly over the past decade. Each indicator has its own scale, shown in the key. As a general rule, dots further to the right tend to signify greater average wealth. For example, the countries with higher numbers of children per woman have that particular dot on the left hand side while those with fewer have it placed on the right. Thanks to South Africa, the southernmost region as a whole does well across most of the metrics. It has particularly high mobile phone subscription rates and the majority of its workforce employed in the service sector. The west is a particularly diverse part of the continent containing both Niger, where there are nearly eight children per woman, as well as Cape Verde where there are just two. Africa’s eastern region contains some of the countries with the lowest median ages in Africa such as Uganda, Somalia and Zambia. However, it also contains Mauritius, where the median age of 34.2 is the highest across the entire continent. Africa is often claimed to be the “mobile continent”. Many people, particularly in its central sub-Saharan region, use mobile as their primary way to access the internet, make cash payments and post to social media. Gabon is the country in Africa with the highest number of mobile subscriptions per person - there are two for every one person living there. Development in northern Africa is more evenly spread than in southern Africa. The only country in the region with a median age lower than 24 is Sudan, where it is 19. |