Growth Pole Map
Fifty-four states, sixteen corridors, twenty-two anchor cities and ports, and the eight growth-pole chapters of Part VI, on one map. Colour the countries by working-age population growth, by GDP, by GDP per capita or by the World Bank’s statistical-capacity score; turn on the confidence layer to hatch the ones whose numbers will not carry the weight; click a country for the same record its card page renders, a corridor for the status claim and its citation, or a pole label for the chapter.
The industry layers are the book’s chapter site tables. Nine of them — critical minerals, oil and gas, auto plants, financial centres, tourism hubs, ports and border posts, power, cable landings and data centres, and the data centres and AI power of Chapter 35’s compute-inputs branch — carrying 292 sites between them, read straight off the site table behind each of Chapters 12 to 19 and Chapter 35. Every site’s popup gives the citation and the claim-ledger identifier of the row it came from, and a row whose coordinates fall outside the map or whose ledger identifier does not resolve is not drawn: it is listed with its reason in the layer file. That list is empty today. These are the sites the chapters argue about, not a cadastre of everything of their kind in Africa, and the counts should not be read as one. A map of African industry assembled from memory would look more finished and be worth less than nothing.
What the confidence layer is for. Three of the fifty-four cards cannot yet compute a confidence flag at all, and twenty come out low. Hatching those twenty-three is not a disclaimer at the bottom of the page; it is the map telling you which parts of any continental pattern you are reading are an artefact of who runs surveys. The Democratic Republic of the Congo’s last census was in 1984. It is the second-largest country on this map.
The corridors and the pole envelopes are schematic. The corridor alignments are waypoints drawn through named cities and border posts, six of them carried over from The New Regional Economics, still schematic rather than the AfDB and PIDA published alignments. PIDA’s current published priority list, the second Priority Action Plan (PAP2, 2021 to 2030), is sixty-nine projects: twenty-five transport, eighteen energy, eleven information and communications, and fifteen transboundary water (AUDA-NEPAD / Virtual PIDA Information Centre, PIDA PAP2 Projects Prospectus and the PAP overview at au-pida.org). This map does not ingest that prospectus or its GIS. The sixty-nine are the official continental filter; the lines here remain schematic waypoints. The pole envelopes are buffered unions of each chapter’s anchors: they mark where a chapter’s argument sits, not a boundary anybody administers. Neither is survey geometry, and neither pretends to be.
Open the map in its own tab, worth doing on a small screen, where the whole viewport goes to the map instead of a frame inside a page.
Colour the map by working-age population growth and read the continent as one picture: a band running from the Sahel through Central and Eastern Africa where twenty-three of the fifty-four states are growing their working-age population by three per cent a year or more, against a Maghreb, a South Africa and a set of island states at or below one and a half. That single map is the demographic term of the identity, and it is the one term handed to Africa rather than earned.
Now switch the field to GDP per capita. The two maps pull against each other — the rank correlation between the two fields on these cards is about −0.5 — and that is the question of the book in two clicks: the places where the workers will be are not, on the whole, the places where the output per worker is, and nothing in the identity guarantees the two maps converge.
Then turn on the confidence layer and look again at the first map. Twelve of those twenty-three high-growth states are hatched: their numbers are low-confidence or the flag cannot be computed at all.
- Pick two countries in the same pole envelope — say Nigeria and Côte d’Ivoire in Chapter 24 — and compare their working-age growth, GDP per capita and SPI score in the popups. What would a pole-level identity statement have to average over?
- Turn the corridor layer on and count the reformed corridors against the unreformed ones. Every status on this map carries a citation in its popup. Which of those citations would you want re-verified before a chapter leaned on it?
Every popup is copied field for field from the same fifty-four records behind the country cards, so a popup and a card cannot disagree. The country outlines are Natural Earth’s 1:50m admin-0 boundaries, public domain, simplified to a fifth of a pixel at the scale the map is drawn. Morocco–Western Sahara is hatched; Somaliland is dissolved into Somalia, because the book gives it no card and a border on a map is a claim. Which release each number comes from is set out on the About the data page.
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