Search Results

The ransoming of captives and the redemption of slaves in precolonial and early colonial sub-Saharan Africa refer to two distinct practices. The ransoming of captives refers to the practice of paying for the release of a captive at the time of capture or soon afterwards and where the freed captive usually returns to their own society with their social status intact. In contrast, the redemption of slaves refers to the practice of the purchasing of the freedom of an enslaved person who then usually remains in a subservient status in their owner’s society. The redemption of slaves has been a well-studied subject throughout sub-Saharan Africa as both a form of indigenous African and colonial manumission policies as well as part of the growing field of social abolition of slavery. The ransoming of captives in precolonial sub-Saharan Africa, unlike in North Africa, is a more recent area of research, with most research concentrated on West Africa. The existence of both ransoming and redemption practices demonstrate that people and their family and friends valued freedom and used a myriad of strategies to achieve and maintain it.

Africa is a place of low social trust. This fact is significant for understanding the politics and economics of the region, whether for questions of national unity or economic coordination and growth. One of the central ways in which trust and social relations have come to be examined within the social sciences is through the notion of social capital, defined as the norms and networks that enable collective action. Use of the concept of social capital has mushroomed in popularity within academia since the 1980s and has been used within African studies to interpret the developmental effects of social relations. It is important to review how researchers have been synthesizing the study of African societies with the social capital approach, and offer suggestions on how this can be better achieved. Specifically, there is contradiction between the view that social capital is useful for economic development and the view that social capital means a community can decide its own economic goals. Students of social capital in Africa must accept that the cultural and normative diversity of the continent necessitates appreciation of the diverse aims of social networks. This means a rejection both of modernist theories of development and postmodern reduction of human relations to forms of power exchange. Future research on trust and social capital in Africa must give weight to community articulations of motivations to trust, what activities count as communal, and what new economic cultures are being formed as a result of present communal varieties.

Migration has had a strong impact on the interplay between ethnicity and nationalism in sub-Saharan Africa. The ethnic map of Africa is the outcome of a lengthy history of comings and goings. Before the European conquests, Africa was not populated by clearly bounded, territorially grounded tribes or ethnic groups in the Western sense. Instead, the most prominent characteristics of precolonial African societies were mobility, overlapping networks, multiple group membership, and the context-dependent drawing of boundaries. Colonialism later shaped, even created ethnic identities, contributing to Africans’ difficulties in adhering to Western notions of nationalism. Afterward, with the postcolonial state taking up its mantle, ethnic loyalty continued to overpower national identity. Local ethnic associations have since acted as a substitute for national citizenship, and ethnic belonging for national consciousness. Three countries can help demonstrate this interplay of ethnicity, nationalism, and migration in sub-Saharan Africa: Côte d’Ivoire, together with the homeland of many of its migrants, Burkina Faso, in West Africa; South Africa, together with the homeland of many of its migrants, Lesotho; and Botswana in Southern Africa. They show that, even across very disparate countries and regions, a common trend is visible toward official attempts to subsume internal ethnic differences under a form of nationalism defined partly by excluding those deemed sometimes rather arbitrarily to be external to the polity. This process has implicated non-African immigrant-origin communities, such as Indians and Lebanese, and has hampered the development of migrant integration policies and led to challenges related to social cohesion.

Language policies in sub-Saharan African nations emerge out of specific political, historical, socioeconomic, and linguistic conditions. Education plays a crucial role for all spheres of language policy. Policies either upgrade or downgrade indigenous languages through their application at various educational institutions. The most significant example is the selection of the language(s) used as languages of learning and teaching at higher-education institutions. The region’s colonial history also influences the language policies of the independent African states. Language policy in Senegal is an example of a francophone country focusing on a linguistic assimilation policy in which minor reforms in favor of indigenous languages have taken place. Rwanda’s language policy is unique as the former francophone nation now uses English as an exoglossic language in a type of hybrid language policy. Botswana is an example of an anglophone country that follows a language policy that is dominated by a very close connection to the notion of nation-building through its concentration on a single language, Setswana, alongside English. Tanzania is an anglophone African country whose policy focuses on Kiswahili, which is one of the very few indigenous and endoglossic languages. Kiswahili is broadly used in Tanzanian educational institutions until the tertiary level, but its use as medium of instruction focuses on the primary level. South Africa demonstrates the very close relationship between general political decisions and language policy and vice versa. Language policy decisions are never neutral and are influenced by the politics of a specific country. As a result, individual and societal language attitudes influence language policies. In addition to this, the overt and official language policy on a macro level may differ from the implementation of such policies on a micro level. At the micro level, practice can include covert language practices by various stakeholders.

Despite their large demographic size, intra-continental African migrations have hardly been taken into account in the theorizing on migration in transnational studies and related fields. Research questions have been framed predominantly from a South-to-North perspective on population movements. This may be a consequence of the fact that the extent and complexity of modern population movements and contacts within Africa are hard to assess, owing mainly to lack of reliable data. For sociolinguists the challenge is even greater, partly because of the spotty knowledge of linguistic diversity in the continent and the scarcity of adequate sociolinguistic descriptions of the ways in which Africans manage their language repertoires. Despite these limitations, a sociolinguistics of intra-continental African migrations will contribute significantly to a better understanding of the conditions, nature, and periodicity of population contacts and interactional dynamics. It will help explain why geographic mobility entails reshaping sociocultural practices, including the language repertoires of both the migrants and the people they come in contact with. Moreover, the peculiarity of African economies, which rely heavily on informal non-institutionalized practices, prompts a rethinking of assumptions regarding the acquisition of the host country’s language(s) as the primary facilitator of the migrants’ socioeconomic inclusion. A sociolinguistic understanding of migrations within Africa can help to formulate new questions and enrich the complex pictures that the study of other parts of the world has already shaped.

Africa is one of the world's poorest regions and it faces numerous and complex challenges as it strives to achieve its development objectives. The main challenges relate to poverty and its alleviation, economic growth, democratization leading to political stability, improving social welfare, and generally creating a just and equitable society. The resolution of these issues is critical to social work if the profession is to make an impact.

Since the 1970s, significant growth globally has occurred in the related fields of sport, exercise, and performance psychology. In Southern Africa, however, this growth has occurred unevenly and, other than isolated pockets of interest, there has been little teaching, research, or practice. South Africa is an exception, however, even during the years of apartheid. A number of international sport psychology pioneers in fact visited South Africa during the 1970s on sponsored trips. Virtually all this activity took place in the economically advantaged sectors of the country, and it is only since the end of apartheid in 1994 that applied services have been extended to the economically disadvantaged areas through both government and private funding. The 2010s have also seen a growing awareness in other Southern African countries, which have begun sporadically using (mainly foreign-based) sport psychology consultants. Among these countries, Botswana is currently leading the way in developing locally based expertise. Throughout the Southern African region, sport, exercise, and performance psychology remain organizationally underdeveloped and unregulated. Local researchers and practitioners in the field face unique challenges, including a multicultural environment and a lack of resources. In working to overcome these challenges, however, they have the potential to significantly add value to the global knowledge base of sport, exercise, and performance psychology.

Sub-Saharan Africa has the world largest proportion of adults and children living with AIDS. To mitigate the multiple consequences of the epidemic, novel forms of governance arose as international organizations usurped the roles traditionally played by states; new funding streams emerged that led to asymmetries in biomedical resource allocation; and diverse partnerships among international agencies, nation-states, and local and international nongovernmental organizations emerged. Global health actors attempted to define AIDS policy and programming as an apolitical biomedical intervention. However, political dynamics were evident in the negotiations between international donors and African state bureaucracies in setting AIDS policy agendas and the contestations between African and international social movements and global health agencies over AIDS treatment drug prices and access to treatment interventions across the continent. During the first two decades of the African AIDS epidemic (1980–2005) the dominant approach to AIDS disease mitigation was the focus on AIDS prevention, and across sub-Saharan Africa standardized prevention interventions were introduced. These interventions were founded upon limited evidence and ultimately these programs failed to stem rates of new HIV infections. Social movements comprising coalitions of local and international activists and scientists brought extensive pressure on global health institutions and nation-states to reform their approach to AIDS and introduce antiretroviral therapy. Yet the path toward universal provision of antiretroviral treatment has been slow and politically contentious. By the second decade of the 21st century, antiretroviral therapy interventions together with AIDS prevention became the dominant policy approach. The introduction of these initiatives led to a significant decline in AIDS-related mortality and slowed rates of transmission. However, health disparities in treatment access remain, highlighting ongoing shortcomings in the political strategies of global health agencies and the public health bureaucracies of African states.

Maritime archaeology in sub-Saharan Africa is still in its early development stage. An extensive literature survey indicated that relatively few projects of this nature have been undertaken in these parts. Even fewer warrant the adjective “scientific,” based on the dearth of peer-reviewed academic publications that have appeared to date. Based on the survey, it seems that most research is undertaken in South Africa, Kenya, and Namibia, and the emphasis therefore lies with these countries.

Malaria is a potentially life-threatening disease transmitted through the bites of female anopheline mosquitos infected with protozoan parasites. Malaria remains one of the major causes of mortality by infectious disease: in 2015, there were an estimated 212 million cases and 429,000 deaths globally, according to the 2016 World Malaria Report. Children under 5 years in sub-Saharan Africa bear the greatest burden of the disease worldwide. However, most of these cases could be prevented or treated. Several methods are highly effective in preventing malaria: in particular, sleeping under an insecticide-treated mosquito net (ITN), indoor residual spraying (IRS), and taking intermittent preventive treatment for pregnant women (IPTp). Regarding treatment, artesiminin-based combination therapy (ACT) is recommended as first-line treatment in many countries. Compared with other actions, malaria prevention behaviors have some specific features. In particular, they produce public health externalities. For example, bed net usage creates positive externalities since bed nets not only directly protect the user, but also reduce transmission probabilities through reduction in the number of disease hosts, and in the case of ITNs, reduction of the vector itself. In contrast, ACT uptake creates both positive externalities when individuals with malaria are treated, and negative externalities in the case of overtreatment that speeds up the spread of long-run parasite resistance. Moreover, ITNs, IPTp, and ACTs are experience goods (meaning individuals only ascertain their benefits upon usage), which implies that current preventive actions are linked to past preventive behaviors. Malaria prevention and eradication produce unambiguous benefits across various domains: economic conditions, educational outcomes, survival, fertility, and health. However, despite the high private returns to prevention, the adoption of antimalarial products and behaviors remains relatively low in malaria-affected areas. A variety of explanations have been proposed for low adoption rates, including financial constraints, high prices, and absence of information. While recent studies highlight that all of these factors play a role, the main barrier to adoption is probably financial constraints. This finding has implications regarding the appropriate pricing policy for these health products. In addition, there is a shortage of causally identified research on the effect of cultural and psychological barriers to the adoption of preventive behaviors. The literature which does exist is from a few randomized control trials of few individuals in very specific geographic and cultural contexts, and may not be generalizable. As a result, there are still ample opportunities for research on applying the insights of behavioral economics to malaria-preventive behavior in particular. Moreover, little research has been done on the supply side, such as whether free or heavily subsidized distribution of prevention technologies is fiscally sustainable; finding effective methods to solve logistical problems which lead to shortages and ineffective alternative treatments to fill the gap; or training sufficient healthcare workers to ensure smooth and effective delivery. Given these gaps in the literature, there are still multiple fruitful avenues for research which may have a first-order effect on reducing the prevalence of malaria in the developing world.

The value of glass beads to archaeologists has increased dramatically in the 21st century thanks to the development and improvements of methods to analyze the chemical composition of the glass used to make them. In addition, the amount of data accumulated from glass analysis has grown to the point that it is often possible to trace the probable origins of various glasses based on elements and trace elements present in the sands or quartz pebbles and sometimes the fluxes used to make the glass. But glassmaking and beadmaking are usually two separate professions, and raw and recycled glass were frequently traded even continents away. Thus, knowledge of bead manufacturing techniques and where they were practiced is needed to help determine where the beads might have been made and how they were traded. Beads found in archaeological assemblages in sub-Saharan Africa between the 7th and 17th centuries ce were made of several glasses from different regions, including the Near East, the eastern Mediterranean, North Africa, South Asia, Central Asia, and China. Sometimes, beads of the same glass type are found right across the continent (particularly in the early period, 7th–10th centuries); but usually, bead assemblages in West Africa are different from those on the eastern side of the continent, and the East Coast and southern Africa are seldom in sync. Southern Africa usually received beads from only one source in any given period, beginning in the 7th century with glass beads from Mesopotamia, then India, followed by beads made from Central Asian glass but an unknown region of production, and finally a return to India. Beads found on the eastern seaboard, from Kenya to Madagascar, came from diverse sources: beginning in the 7th century with beads from South Asia (probably Sri Lanka) and others from Mesopotamia (like those in the south). These were followed by beads from India along with a few from Egypt or the eastern Mediterranean. In the early 15th century, a scattering of beads from China appeared, possibly brought as gifts by the fleet of the Chinese admiral Zheng He. Then a century later, more Chinese beads are found, but they were probably brought by early European traders. West Africa began, like the other regions, with beads of glass from Mesopotamia, which were followed by similar beads, but they were made of glass produced in the Levant or Egypt. After the 11th century, the region received very small numbers of beads from India and ones made of glass from Central Asia, but the most interesting were beads made of glass that was produced in Ile Ife, Nigeria—the only known primary glass production center in sub-Saharan Africa.

A coup d’état is an all-around consequential event, and coups remain frequent in sub-Saharan Africa. Historically, ethnic inequality—the measure of income disparities at the level of ethnic groups—has been paid little attention as a potential cause of coups and other types of regime breakdown. More work exists on the relationship between ethnicity broadly construed and coup d’état, and in particular the role of unequal access to the military for different ethnic groups and the role of ethnic exclusion from political power. Our own work presents a theory that links “between” and “within” ethnic group income inequality to coup d’état initiated by ethnic groups. The argument is that high income and wealth inequality between ethnic groups, coupled with within-group homogeneity, increases the salience of ethnicity and solidifies within-group preferences vis-à-vis the preferences of other ethnic groups, increasing the appeal and feasibility of a coup. Empirical findings from sub-Saharan Africa support the main theoretical claim linking ethnic inequality to coup d’état. Additional evidence from sub-Saharan Africa and a larger global sample are consistent with the causal mechanisms. More remains to be researched in this area, however. Directions for future research include looking at the access of ethnic groups to the military, the intervening role of natural resources in the calculus of ethnic groups, and the role of ethnic inequality in incumbent takeovers.

Education has been a central institution in the installation and legitimation of gender binaries and racialized difference in colonial and postcolonial eras. While the term “postcolonial” can refer to the period after which colonized nations gained their independence, a postcolonial critique also engages with the afterlife of the metaphysics of Western modernity. Notably, the imperial project of Western modernity assumed the superiority of the colonizers and provided the legitimation for the deep injustices of colonization to be framed as a “civilizing mission.” In particular, the processes of colonization imposed a “modern/colonial gender system,” which reconstructed the gender norms of many societies around the world, and which subordinated women by binding them to the domestic sphere. Its “biologic” presumed a heterosexual matrix in ways that were also profoundly racialized. Importantly, education was a critical institution that not only legitimated Western knowledges and values, but also secured women’s regulation and subordination. In postcolonial eras, education was given central importance in ways that have tied it to modern imperatives. For the newly independent postcolonial nation, education was critical in the construction of a national imaginary but this framing has reproduced rather than disrupting colonial gender norms. Harnessing education in support of national development inserted the postcolonial nation in a hierarchy of “developed” and “developing” nations. The focus on development similarly permeated efforts at curricular reform, such that they often reproduced the gendered, racialized, and classed hierarchies of colonial education. What counted as legitimate knowledge remained framed by Western elite institutions and their technologies of power. Importantly, from the moment of their independence, the global reach of multilateral organizations has constantly framed the postcolonial trajectories of “developing” nations and their educational reforms. Although often contradictory, the discourses of such organizations intensified the imperatives of education for national development. This compounded pressures to increase educational access beyond elite groups and to include more females. However, the technologies of power that support these international policy agendas bind such reforms to modern imperatives, so that they have become a critical site for the reinscription of binary understandings of gender. This is also true for contemporary international concerns for “quality” education. This is prosecuted largely through promotion of learner-centered education, a concept that is also infused with Western democratic ideals and values. Interrogation of the “hidden curriculum” further shows that the education in postcolonial contexts remains a key institution through which gender is instantiated in essentialized and binary ways, infused by modern ideals of presumptive heteronormativity. Resisting such binaries requires an understanding of gender as something that we “do,” or that we “perform,” within the contingencies and exigencies of particular social and cultural contexts. In turn, these theoretical understandings call for in-depth qualitative studies that can attend to the particularities of the gender regimes in different educational contexts and other intersecting structures of difference (race, ethnicity, religion, class, sexuality) that are rendered invisible by education’s legitimation of difference as a question of disembodied individual merit and ability.

Household air pollution from use of solid fuels (biomass fuels and coal) is a major problem in low and middle income countries, where 90% of the population relies on these fuels as the primary source of domestic energy. Use of solid fuels has multiple impacts, on individuals and households, and on the local and global environment. For individuals, the impact on health can be considerable, as household air pollution from solid fuel use has been associated with acute lower respiratory infections, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, lung cancer, and other illnesses. Household-level impacts include the work, time, and high opportunity costs involved in biomass fuel collection and processing. Harvesting and burning biomass fuels affects local environments by contributing to deforestation and outdoor air pollution. At a global level, inefficient burning of solid fuels contributes to climate change. Improved biomass cookstoves have for a long time been considered the most feasible immediate intervention in resource-poor settings. Their ability to reduce exposure to household air pollution to levels that meet health standards is however questionable. In addition, adoption of improved cookstoves has been low, and there is limited evidence on how the barriers to adoption and use can be overcome. However, the issue of household air pollution in low and middle income countries has gained considerable attention in recent years, with a range of international initiatives in place to address it. These initiatives could enable a transition from biomass to cleaner fuels, but such a transition also requires an enabling policy environment, especially at the national level, and new modes of financing technology delivery. More research is also needed to guide policy and interventions, especially on exposure-response relationships with various health outcomes and on how to overcome poverty and other barriers to wide-scale transition from biomass fuels to cleaner forms of energy.

In a liberal conception of democracy, courts play an important role in facilitating the rule of law by controlling the abidance to rules and by holding the political branches of government accountable. The power of constitutional review is a crucial element for exercising horizontal accountability. Courts across Africa are vested with the power of constitutional review, and, generally speaking, their independence has substantially increased since the beginning of the 1990s—although African courts enjoy overall less independence than the global average for courts’ independence. Within the African region, the level of judicial independence varies widely, between contexts that rarely allow judicial independence and contexts where courts have more power to challenge the government. Furthermore, across the continent, African courts experience undue interference—which frequently takes place informally. Informal interference can occur through the biased appointments of judges, verbal and physical threats, violent attacks, the payment of bribes, or the ouster of sitting judges. Informal networks—held together by ties based on shared educational trajectories, common leisure activities, religion, kinship relations, or political affiliations—are the channels through which such pressure can be transmitted. Yet judges also can actively build informal networks: namely, with the legal community, civil society, and international donors, so as to insulate themselves against undue interference and to increase institutional legitimacy. Research has shown that the agency of judges and courts in signaling impartial decision-making, as well as in reaching out to society, is crucial to constructing legitimacy in the African context. In contrast, the explanatory power of electoral competition as an incentive for power holders to support judicial independence is not straightforward in the context of Africa’s political regimes, where the prospect of losing office is associated with financial, and in some cases even physical, insecurity. However, research on judicial politics in Africa is still only preliminary, because the field requires more comparative studies in order to fully reveal the political repercussions on Africa’s judiciaries as well as to delineate the scope conditions of the prominent theories explaining judicial independence.

Economic development involves increasing agricultural productivity, building technological capabilities among domestic firms, export diversification, and industrialization. In the 21st century of fragmented production processes dispersed globally, it also entails positioning domestic firms in global production networks in order to create wealth and employment as well as increasing production for a growing domestic market. Despite two decades of high levels of growth between the mid-1990s and mid-2010s, very few African countries have created manufacturing industries that are internationally competitive and have diversified their exports away from dependence on a few primary commodities, and most African countries still import the majority of their manufactured goods. Economic transformation does not emerge from the interplay of free market forces but rather requires proactive, targeted government policies. Such industrial policies include providing infrastructure, access to credit, and training labor but also incentivizing and assisting locally owned firms to build their technological capabilities in order to become internationally competitive. Well-conceived industrial policies are only successful if they are implemented, and that is much more difficult. African governments have been relatively less successful with implementing industrial policies, in the past and the present. They pursued ambitious industrial policies in the immediate post-independence period in the form of import-substitution industrialization strategies. At that time, industrial policies relied on the creation of state-owned enterprises, as in other regions of the world, but unlike in other developing countries, these strategies did not support private firms as well. This trend is explained by the political settlements in the newly independent African countries, which were generally characterized by a small domestic capitalist class with low capabilities. The experience accumulated during the import-substitution period was undermined by rapid trade liberalization and privatization in the 1980s and 1990s. Liberalization and privatization opened up new economic opportunities and shifted the locus of capital accumulation from the state sector to the private sector, while democratization and elections created pressure on political leaders to find more political financing with which to maintain their ruling coalitions and to find it through avenues outside of the state, including starting their own businesses. Ruling elites’ strategies for political survival inevitably became intertwined with government strategies to promote economic development. Whether or not contemporary African governments pursue industrial policies and are able to implement them depends on how ruling coalitions are formed within the distribution of power in a particular society. No set of ruling elites is ever completely autonomous. What matters is how coalitional pressures shape the political costs of certain policies and the ability to implement them, given the resistance or support from powerful groups within and outside the ruling coalition. This is because industrial policies require decisions about resource allocation and institutional changes that usually are contested by some group in society and because they entail creating, allocating, and managing economic rents.

Political party systems are an important element of political systems in Africa and elsewhere. They form the central intermediate institution between the general population and the government. Party systems represent and aggregate diverse political views and group interests, and they form coalitions that then form governments with potentially important consequences of democracy and political stability. Unlike the case in the period directly after independence, African party systems have been overwhelmingly multiparty since the 1990s. As a result, the literature has grown significantly, although most works focus on political parties rather than party systems. Many efforts have been devoted to classification, referring to the legal context as well as, more specifically, the number of relevant parties, the levels of institutionalization, and, less often, the degree of ideological or other polarization. While levels of institutionalization and ideological differences are generally not pronounced, more than half of African party systems have been one-party dominant, of which most are authoritarian. In contrast, two-party and pluralist-party systems, which make up approximately one half of all multiparty systems, are generally more democratic. Besides determining classifications, most analytical work focuses on the determinants of African party systems using quantitative and qualitative as well as macro- and micro-level methodologies. Three determinants are debated: first, ethnicity, which has been cited as the main social cleavage behind African party systems; however, while ethnicity matters, its effects vary and are limited; second, political institutions, especially electoral systems for legislative elections, which only partly explain fragmentation or other features; third, the performance of political parties and rationalist approaches. Scholars largely agree that all of these elements need to be taken into account. While certain functions of party systems may facilitate democratization and political stability or other outcomes, little empirical work exists on the consequences of party systems. Some evidence suggests that highly institutionalized, moderately fragmented, and polarized systems promote democracy. Future research faces many challenges, in particular the development of integrated theory and more fine-grained data, as well as an increased focus on the consequences of party systems.

Educational psychology in Africa has a rich and colorful history. In sub-Saharan Africa educational psychology, as both a profession and a scientific field, is particularly vibrant. The emergence of educational psychology in sub-Saharan Africa shows how the science and the profession has pirouetted in ways that could support mental health and learning in African contexts in innovative ways. While emanating within Western cultures, educational psychology has been adapted and, perhaps, been deeply enriched in the African context. After the initial establishment of educational psychology in sub-Saharan Africa, three broad eras of theoretical development are evident: (a) the era of ecosystems and community, (b) the era of inclusion, and (c) the era of strength-based and positive approaches. During the era of ecosystems and community, emergent theories challenged the dominance of the individualist paradigms in educational psychology and provided broadened conceptualizations of the factors that impact mental health and effective learning. The role of communities was also given prominence. During the era of inclusion, the medical model was challenged as the primary foundation for legitimizing educational psychological assessments and interventions. Educational psychologists moved toward rights-based approaches that championed the rights of vulnerable populations and the creation of inclusive learning environments. The inclusion of children with disabilities influenced policy development in multiple sub-Saharan countries and expanded the dialogues on how best to support learning for all children. During the era of strength-based and positive approaches, theoretical and pragmatic approaches that forefront strengths, capacities, and possibilities started to develop. This era signified yet another departure from previous hegemonic paradigms in that educational psychology moved beyond the individual level, toward more systemic approaches, but then also used approaches that focused more on strengths and the mobilization of resources within these systems to address challenges and to optimize educational psychological support. These eras in the development of educational psychology in sub-Saharan Africa created optimal opportunities to respond to the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In terms of SDGs, educational psychology responds primarily to Global Goal 3 (health and well-being) and Global Goal 4 (quality education). At the same time it supports the Global Goals of no poverty (1), gender equality (5), decent work and economic growth (8), reduced inequalities (10), sustainable cities and communities (11), and building partnerships for the goals (17).

From the first billion people in the world in 1800 to the projected 9.7 billion people in 2050, the world’s population has passed through various stages. However, the different stages have not been the same for each global region or for every country within the same region. On one side of the spectrum is the fertility transition in Europe and North America, where the decline has been steady, with the median total fertility rate (TFR) declining from 2.80 children per woman in 1950–1955 to 1.66 in 2015–2020. In this region, childbearing is no longer the final goal of marriage, and this change has been accompanied by the emergence of new forms of union. The fertility rate is below the level of replacement in almost all the countries. On the other side of the spectrum is sub-Saharan Africa, where fertility has declined slowly and has stalled in various countries since the 2000s. The median TFR in the region declined from 6.51 children per woman in 1950–1955 to 4.72 in 2015–2020. In this region, this trend is associated with slower increase of the age at first marriage and in of the modern contraception. The fertility transition and its associated factors in the other regions of the world fluctuate between these two scenarios.