Africa and the francophonie of tomorrow: an attempt to measure the population of the Francophonie from now to 2060
Population studies
25
Issue: 2
(12 - 2011)
Habib Bourgiba, Hamani Diori and Léopold Sédar Senghor are considered the
fathers of the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie (OIF), an interna-
tional community created in the early 1960s that currently unites more than
thirty countries where the French language is given a major role in public life,
education, the arts, law, the media, etc. Some present the OIF as a neo-colonial
organization, while others think of it as protecting the world’s cultural diversity in
the face of globalization. Regardless, this assembly of countries around the world
has played and should continue to play a significant role in international politics.
However, the configurational changes this Francophone community has experi-
enced since its inception in the 1960s are nothing compared with those we pre-
dict for the next 50 years. In fact, the most recent demographic trends outlined in
the United Nations’ latest population projections are leading to a major reconfig-
uration of the demographic weight of the countries of the world, particularly in
Africa. In this context, we were interested to try a forward-looking exercise based
on these most recent projections from the UN that could allow us to define the
Francophonie of tomorrow by exploring the evolution of Africa’s demographic
weight. In the coming decades, what will be the size and the geographic distribu-
tion of the Francophone population? How has Africa’s demographic weight in the
espace francophone evolved? And how will it evolve in the future? In this article,
we try to better define the demographic outline of tomorrow’s Francophonie by
drawing on different definitions of the espace francophone, while highlighting
some of the political and social issues of this forward-looking exercise for the
Francophone community in general, and for Africa in particular.
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