How many people live in Africa?

How to get close to this number

Take a share of the world. The explanation gives it as roughly eighteen percent of humanity, and world population is around eight billion. Continental populations are much easier to recall as shares than as absolute numbers, and the share is the more durable fact because it changes slowly.

Except here it is changing fast, which is the whole point. This is the only continent still growing quickly, and the projection in the explanation puts it at one in four people alive by mid-century. A share that has been stable for a generation is now moving, which makes anchoring on an old share the main source of error.

The age structure is what drives the projection rather than birth rates alone. A young population keeps growing for decades even as fertility falls, because the number of people entering childbearing age keeps rising — the same demographic momentum that appears in the births question on this site. Projections of this kind are about age pyramids, not about how many children people choose to have.