One hundred and fifty years of African population on one map. Drag the year, or press play, and the fifty-four countries resize. Switch the scaling to the working-age population aged 15 to 64 and the map redraws around the people who actually produce the output: the countries still early in their fertility transition shrink, because so much of their population is under 15. Switch on the confidence layer and the ones whose numbers rest on an old census fade out.
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Hover a country, or tap one on a phone, for its numbers in the selected year; the choice stays pinned until you pick another. A reader who would rather have a table than a map should use the country cards, which carry the 2024, 2050 and 2100 values for every country here.
Circle area, not radius, is proportional to population, and the scale is fixed across the whole century so that 1950 and 2100 can be compared. Switching to the working-age view rescales to the largest working-age population on the grid, so the two views are each internally comparable but are not the same ruler.
The working-age view is the point of the toggle. Term one of the book's identity is working-age population growth, not population growth. A country whose population is 40 per cent under 15 has far fewer workers than its total suggests, and the gap between the two maps in any given year is the part of the demographic dividend that has not arrived yet.
The confidence layer is the same flag the cards carry. It is the flag the Growth Pole Map and the country cards show, read from the same record, so a country cannot be confident here and hatched there. Fading is not a disclaimer at the bottom of the page: it is the map saying which parts of the pattern you are reading are an artefact of who runs censuses. The Democratic Republic of the Congo's last census was in 1984, and it is one of the largest circles on this map after 2050.
Morocco–Western Sahara is hatched, as everywhere else in the book. Western Sahara has no country card and no circle. Somaliland has no card either, so it has no border here: it is dissolved into Somalia rather than drawn and left unexplained.
The cities appear twice, and that is deliberate. Switch on the city layer and the largest agglomeration on each card is drawn in green at 2025 and again at 2050, and at no year between. The reason is the source: Africapolis redrew its agglomerations between its 2015 and 2020 layers, and again for 2050, so its own 1950-to-2050 run is not one measurement repeated, and a bubble dragged across it would animate a change of definition and call it growth. Fifty of the fifty-four cards carry a figure. Burundi, Egypt, Kenya and South Sudan do not, because on the current delineation their largest agglomeration is not one a reader would recognise, and the panel says so when you hover them rather than leaving a hole.
A projection is not a measurement. Everything after 2024 on this slider is the WPP medium variant, one path through a fan of them; the high and low variants for 2100 differ by billions. The slider is a way of reading the medium variant's arithmetic, not a claim that the arithmetic will happen.
All fifty-four country cards · Growth Pole Map · Convergence Calculator