The Coming Billion: How the Continent’s Crowded Cities Will Rise

By John Kourkoutas

Africa will add roughly a billion people by 2050. Almost none of them will live anywhere new.

The continent has about 1.55 billion inhabitants today and is heading for around 2.5 billion by mid-century. That growth will not flow outward into the vast open spaces on the map. It will pack tighter into places that are already crowded. This matters because those open spaces are most of Africa.

The Average Describes Nobody

Africa averages about 50 people per square kilometer, roughly 130 per square mile. That figure is nearly useless, because nobody lives at the average.

What exists instead is a continent of nine clusters:

• the Nile valley and delta
• the Maghreb coast
• the Gulf of Guinea coast, from Abidjan through Accra to Lagos
• the Sahel belt across northern Nigeria and Mali
• the Ethiopian highlands
• the Great Lakes region
• Kinshasa and the lower Congo
• the Angolan coast around Luanda
• Gauteng and the KwaZulu-Natal coast

The cities anchoring them are enormous. Cairo holds about 23 million people, Lagos about 22 million, Kinshasa about 17 million, Johannesburg about 15 million and Luanda about 10 million. Between these clusters lies genuine emptiness, and it is expensive emptiness to cross.

Why National Density Misleads

That is why national population density may be the most deceptive number in African market sizing.

Take Egypt, which averages about 114 people per square kilometer. The figure describes almost no one. Around 95 percent of Egyptians live on about 5 percent of the land, along the Nile, where density is an order of magnitude higher. The rest is desert.

The distortion runs the other way, too. Namibia averages about 3.6 people per square kilometer, Botswana 4.3, Libya 4.5 and Mauritania 4.8. These are not thin markets spread evenly across a map. They are a handful of towns separated by very long drives.

Density Is an Underpriced Advantage

Density also cuts in a company’s favor more often than anyone accounts for. Measured the same way, Rwanda runs at about 550 people per square kilometer and Burundi at 503. The Netherlands manages 490, and India 464. Both African countries are denser than either.

Their total populations are small, but a single truck can serve nearly the whole of either country in a day. That makes them cheap places to distribute in, and almost no one costs them that way.

Route to Market Is the Real Constraint

The practical consequence is that route to market, not market size, sets the economics.

In most African countries, “national distribution” means reaching two or three cities. A distributor who covers Lagos does not cover Nigeria. Cost to serve is driven by the distance between clusters rather than by the size of the country, and the second cluster almost always costs far more to reach than the first.

Consider one more figure. The 61 largest urban areas on the continent hold about 262 million people, roughly 17 percent of Africa’s population. The remaining 83 percent live outside them. That is why a strategy built only around capital cities quietly fails in many of these markets.

Count Clusters, Not Countries

The question for any company, then, is not how many people live in a country. It is how many clusters a distributor can actually reach, and what the second one costs to add.

Before the next Africa strategy deck goes to the board, draw the clusters you can serve and add up their populations instead of the national totals. The number will come out smaller. It will also be real.

John Kourkoutas is business development expert that specializes in helping companies, export teams, and business leaders succeed in Africa’s dynamic and emerging markets.