With a median age of 18.8 years, Africa has the world’s youngest population, by a country mile. No other part of the world has been as young for decades, nor will be for some time. India’s median age is 28.2, and steadily greying China stands at 38.9, already older than the United States, which clocks in at 38.1.

This is certainly an imperfect comparison, not only because the latter three are countries, but also because there is a material variation across Africa. In the fast-growing countries of Western, Middle and Eastern Africa (as defined by the UNDP), the median age is much younger. Southern and Northern Africa, whose fertility is mostly within 2 to 4 children per woman band, are slightly older.

Be that as it may, this fact has an implication worth paying close attention to: by 2050, a third of the world’s youth (those aged 15-24), along with a similarly large share of its working-age population, will live on the continent. Additionally, this share will continue expanding to the end of the century. By 2100, half of the world’s under-18s will be African.

Importantly, as Edward Paice points out in his deeply-researched book Youthquake – Why African Demography Should Matter to the World, much of this growth is already baked-in, meaning it will happen even if the continent’s birth rate were to suddenly drop to sub-replacement over the next decade.

Needless to say, such drop is nowhere on the horizon. As the quality of data on the continent’s population dynamics improves, the UNDP has been revising its medium-variant projections for Africa’s population through 2100 upwards almost every edition of its “World Population Prospects” steadily since the middle of the 2000s.

These upward revisions tend not to receive as much media attention as the occasional downward adjustment, but they have proved to be more durable. And given that, by Paice’s reckoning, the UNDP has been the most reliable population prophet of all, it’s safe to assume that it’s right.

In short, to ironically borrow the words of the population-obsessed Marvel villain Thanos, Africa is inevitable.

Western commentary on this phenomenon, as we pointed out last week, has been decidedly catastrophist. Both the optimists and pessimists seem to agree on one thing: that Africa’s population is growing too fast. To the pessimists, this means that Africa risks becoming overpopulated and descending into chaos as people clamour for scarce resources.

The optimists, for their part, just want Africa to reap the so-called demographic dividend which, most demographers contend, can only come if the continent’s runaway fertility is curbed, thus lowering dependency ratios. Sure, they concede, the build-out of infrastructure and visionary leadership are also important, but a demographic transition is the sine qua non.

However, all this is much ado about nothing. There is no evidence that Africa is anywhere close to being overpopulated. The continent’s landmass is greater than the combined area of the United States, China, India and the European Union, which together have a population of 3.64 billion people right now.