Between the Sahara to the north and savanna to the south lies the semi-arid Sahel, a region stretching from Senegal to Sudan that has experienced desperate poverty, climate change, malnutrition, and violence. While every context is different, the Sahelian countries share some common challenges, including a pattern of recurring crises and fluid borders. Boko Haram’s reign of terror in northern Nigeria and Mali’s coup have both had cross-border components. [Video Below]

A pair of recently launched data sources offers visualizations to help people understand two hot-button issues in demography: the demographic dividend and changing fertility rates.

In 1968, Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich predicted hundreds of millions would starve to death over the next decade, many of them Americans, and the world would generally decline into chaos in his book The Population Bomb.

East African countries like Kenya have made great strides in recent decades in increasing access to modern contraception, leading to marked declines in fertility rates. But disparities remain.

The world is about to hit a “turning point” in maternal and newborn health, said Laura Laski, chief of the sexual and reproductive health at UNFPA, at the Wilson Center on March 23. “In terms of strengthening the new health system for achieving the MDGS or any other goals, we have to focus on the human resources for health.” In particular, midwives.

Sub-Saharan Africa is often characterized as an outlier in terms of population dynamics and reproductive health. While women are having fewer children around the world, even prompting some places to begin worrying about aging populations, the demographic transition is proceeding more slowly in Africa. Fertility rates in North and Southern Africa have declined to around three children per woman, but the three other sub-regions of the continent – East, Central, and West Africa – retain much higher fertility, between five and six children per woman. Whether, and how quickly, fertility rates decline in these regions over the next few decades will in large part determine the peak of world population. These regions’ demographic trajectories also have important implications for health, governance, food security, economic development, land use, climate vulnerability, and even security.