(Posted 18th October 2026)
Courtesy of John Kourkoutas / LinkedIn
The continent is about 1.55 billion people today, heading for around 2.5 billion by 2050. That growth concentrates into places that are already full. It does not spread into the space on the map.
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Which matters, because the space on the map is most of it.
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Africa averages about 50 people per square kilometre. That number is useless. Nobody lives at the average.
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What actually exists is nine clusters.
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The Nile valley and delta. The Maghreb coast. The Gulf of Guinea coast from Abidjan through Accra to Lagos. The Sahel belt across northern Nigeria and Mali. The Ethiopian highlands. The Great Lakes. Kinshasa and the lower Congo. The Angolan coast around Luanda. Gauteng and the KwaZulu-Natal coast.
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Cairo is about 23 million. Lagos about 22. Kinshasa about 17. Johannesburg about 15. Luanda about 10.
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Between those clusters there is genuine emptiness, and it is expensive emptiness.
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This is why national population density is the most misleading number in African market sizing.
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Egypt averages about 114 people per square kilometre. That describes nobody. Around 95 percent of Egyptians live on about 5 percent of the land. Where they actually are, density is an order of magnitude higher. The rest is desert.
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The average misleads in reverse too. Namibia is about 3.6 per square kilometre, Botswana 4.3, Libya 4.5, Mauritania 4.8. Those are not thin markets spread evenly. They are a few towns and a very long drive.
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And density cuts in your favour more often than anyone prices it.
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Measured the same way, on the same projection, Rwanda runs about 550 per square kilometre and Burundi 503. The Netherlands is 490. India is 464. Both are denser than either. Small total populations, but a lorry can serve the whole country in a day. That is cheap to distribute in, and it is almost never costed that way.
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The practical consequence is route to market.
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In most African countries, national distribution means two or three cities. A distributor who covers Lagos does not cover Nigeria. Your cost to serve is driven by the distance between clusters, not by the size of the country, and the second cluster almost always costs far more than the first.
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One more number worth holding. The 61 largest urban areas hold about 262 million people between them, roughly 17 percent of Africa. The other 83 percent is not in a big city, which is why a capital-city-only strategy quietly fails in half these markets.
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So the question is not how many people live in the country.
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It is how many clusters your distributor can actually reach, and what the second one costs to add.
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Before the next Africa strategy deck, draw the clusters you can serve and add up those populations instead of the national ones. The number will come out smaller. It will also be real.
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If you want that done properly for your category, that is the work we do.
