HARNESSING AFRICA’S DEMOGRAPHY DIVIDEND FOR SUSTAINABLE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT: PANEL EVIDENCE ON GROWTH AND ADJUSTED NET SAVINGS, 1991-2023

Abstract

Africa’s changing age structure creates a potential demographic dividend, but it does not establish that faster or more sustainable development has occurred. This study examines the relationship between demographic change, medium-term real GDP per capita growth and adjusted net savings using an annual panel of 54 African countries from 1991 to 2023. The main two-way fixed-effects sample contains 1,155 country-year observations from 50 countries. Population-weighted trends show that the working-age share rose from 52.45% to 56.97%, the age-dependency ratio fell from 91.18 to 76.59, and total fertility declined from 5.87 to 4.12 births per woman. Pooled regressions display the familiar demographic-dividend pattern, but the working-age and dependency coefficients become small and statistically insignificant after country and year effects are introduced. Sequential fixed-effects models also show no robust direct age-structure association. Fertility is negatively associated with five-year forward annualised growth in the fully controlled baseline model (β = −1.115, p = .032 with country-clustered inference; p = .001 with Driscoll–Kraay inference), but the estimate is sensitive to the control set and loses conventional significance in several stricter checks, including country-specific trends and non-overlapping five-year windows. Interaction terms involving secondary enrolment, employment and female labour-force participation are not robustly significant, and the demographic indicators do not predict adjusted net savings. The findings are associational rather than causal. They support a conditional interpretation in which reproductive choice and age-structure change create opportunities whose economic value depends on learning quality, productive employment, women’s economic participation, investment and capable institutions.