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By Dirisu Yakubu

Making Africa’s population an asset for Africans and the rest of the world dominated discussions yesterday at a sensitization and advocacy workshop held on Wednesday.

The two-day event organized by the Africa Progress Group, APG, and the Centre for Human Security and Dialogue of the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library was held onsite and online and was facilitated by the Open Society Foundations based in the United States of America.

The workshop attracted policymakers, political leaders, human rights activists, religious, youths and women groups drawn from Benin, Botswana, Burundi, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, DRC, Ghana, Malawi, Nigeria, Senegal and the Republic of Togo.

Coordinator of the group, Prof. Peter Okebukola, a former Executive Secretary of the National Universities Commission, NUC and Chairman Governing Council of the National Open University of Nigeria, NOUN, in his welcome remarks, described population management as a human rights issue.

This, he said, rests on the belief that effective management of populations is inextricably linked with rights to education, health, food security and other dimensions of human rights.

He said that population estimates predict that by 2050, of about 2.2 billion that will be added to the global population, more than half of the number would come from Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania, Egypt, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The former NUC boss added that about 41 per cent of Africa’s 1.13 billion population is made up of children below the age of 15 while only about 4 per cent were persons older than the age of 65. Nine out of the ten countries in the world with the highest proportion of population aged less than 15 years in 2020, were in Africa.

A major concern about African rapid population growth, Okebukola said, was that jobs, national infrastructures, social services, housing, health care facilities are not growing at an equally comparable rate.

According to him, “APG is in league with United Nations Population Fund, UNFPA in the prosecution of the goal of making Africa’s population an asset. On August 17, 2021, the 2020 APG report on ‘Making Africa’s Population An Asset’ was launched by former President Olusegun Obasanjo who is chairman of APG, alongside UNFPA officials and Ambassadors/High Commissioners of several African countries

“As a follow-up to the launch, there is now an urgent need to conduct sensitization and advocacy workshops on the promotion of population-related human rights activities in Africa based on the 2020 APG report

“The need to establish an index for measuring responsiveness and comparing the readiness of African countries to make population an asset was the basis for APG to initiate a unique measure of the level of national responsiveness in catering for the growing population

“How will the fast-growing population be educated? How will their food and nutrition; security and health security needs be assured? How will they be housed? How will their welfare and social security be catered for? These are some of the key questions to which answers should be urgently sought to avert the growing population being a burden. The task at hand, to make the population an asset, is to stay on the positive side of measures of socio-economic development,” he said.

The Special Guest of Honour at the event, Professor Sarah Agbor, said ex-president, Dr Olusegun Obasanjo’s sense of patriotism and seeking solutions to set Africa on the fast track in achieving Africa we want by 2063 is seen in the APG report on making Africa’s population an asset.

Agbor, who is Commissioner for Education, Science, Technology and Innovation, African Union Commission, Addis Ababa, noted that Africa is facing several pressures which have been further weakened by the COVID-19 pandemic, thus reversing gains made over the last decade.