Africa is a continent and as many of us know, the continent is not a single country. Africa is currently divided between 54 different independent countries, but what would happen if all of these countries united today to form a united African state?
For starters, Africa is huge, and covers over 20% of all the land on Earth making it about 70% of the same size as all of Asia or about three times the size of all of Europe.
Did you know? 1.2 billion people currently live in Africa or about 16% of the entire global population, so interestingly a United African state would actually have a smaller population than both India and China, but this would not be the case for very long since Africa is currently experiencing the largest population boom in the world.
The population of the,continent has doubled since just 1990 and the continent is expected to surpass the populations of both India and China in the same year 2022, according to official UN estimates, the population of Africa is expected to reach a massive 4.4 billion people by the end of the 21st century and comprise 39% of the global population.
The population of Africa currently is the youngest in the world with a median age of just 19.7 years old compared to the global average of 30.4 years old, literacy rates are also low with only sixty-four percent of the population being considered literate, but this varies between regions.
In Libya for example, the literacy rate is very high at 86.1 percent while in South Sudan it is very low at only 27%. HIV infection rates in the continent would also pose a severe challenge to the United Africa as 11% of the population in sub-saharan Africa is currently infected with the disease.
In addition to these challenges United African states would also struggle with the extreme diversity on the continent. Africa is the most linguistically and ethnically diverse continents on the planet where somewhere between 1250 and 3000 languages are spoken.
A situation similar to South Africa where there are 11 official languages would probably have to exist, the most common languages are Arabic spoken by about 17% of the population mostly in North Africa, Swahili by about 10% located mostly in Southeast Africa, Berber by five percent, and Hausa by another five percent. English, French, and Portuguese are understood by a large amount of people. Where English is understood by thirteen percent of the population, French close behind at 11.5 percent, and Portuguese by 3%, all of these languages would probably have official status as well as several others.
There are hundreds, if not thousands of different ethnic groups that exist in Africa, maps don’t do enough Justice to them, but no one single group would even have over an eight percent share of the total population in terms of religion, Christians and Muslims are almost perfectly divided with each face claiming about forty-seven percent of the continent population, traditional African religions would represent about ten percent of the population and this adds two more than one hundred percent because several people hold mix to believe about, a final two percent of the population would be atheist or non-religious.
The biggest city in Africa, Lagos in Nigeria has a greater population than all of Romania combined, but despite this, it probably wouldn’t be the capital city, I predict that the capital city would probably be located in Ethiopia at “Addis Ababa”, this is because of the African Union already exists there, the United Nations Economic Commission of Africa is also headquartered there, Addis Ababa is often already called the political capital of Africa so it would,make sense to agree that the city would serve as a capital city of the United continent as well.
Africa is incredibly rich in natural resources, possessing ninety percent of the world’s platinum, fifty percent of its gold, fifty percent of its diamonds, and another thirty three percent of its uranium, despite this however, it remains the poorest continent on the planet, the United African states would have a gdp of 2.39 trillion U.S dollars, making it only the seventh largest economy in the world, it would barely feed out India’s economy but remain behind those of France, the United Kingdom and Germany.
The gdp per capita of Africa would only be 1992 dollars per years but that figure isn’t totally accurate of how crushing the poverty on the continent actually is, because of rampant government corruption, according to the world bank, poverty is defined as living under $1.25 per day, based on that fifty percent of the population of sub-saharan Africa would be living in poverty with the average for person on the continent living on less than seventy cents per day
Africa has a lot of room to grow, the continent is projected to be the quickest growing region of the world in the future, and her gdp is expected to finally overtakes france and the united kingdom by 2033, will still remain behind Germany then, all things considered.
Though Africa certainly has the potential if it’s United to become a worldpower by the end of the 21st century, it would have a massive population to fuel a massive army and a potentially huge economy that could one day rival the rest of the world with one flag.