In this post I’ll be looking at data showing a young Africa and an aging world. The charts are based on World Bank Indicators data/ I used Looker Studio to connect to the dataset in BigQuery and visualized it.

Population aged 65 and above as a % of Total Population

This map uses the WDI Indicator Population ages 65 and above (% of total population). We can see from this map that Europe, North America and East Asia have the highest percentages of people above the age of 65.

In the map below green equals a high percentage while red indicates a low percentage, and yellow indicates a mid-range percentage.

In the table below we see the top 20 countries based on their percentage of elderly people (above the age of 65) with Japan being the highest. The UAE has the lowest. We can see that most of the countries with a high percentage of elderly people are in Europe while most of the countries with the fewest elderly people are in Africa.

Below is a close up of Europe showing the the colour green indicating a high % of people over 65.

Another way of looking at this type of data is to view it as a population pyramid. The website PopulationPyramid.net gives a breakdown of regional and national population data.

Below is the population pyramid for Europe in 2020, the most recent World Bank data available.

Population ages 0-14 as a % of Total Population

On the other end of the spectrum if we look at countries with a high percentage of young people, we see that Africa dominates.

In the map below the colours are inverse from the maps above, with green indicating a high percentage of young people and red indicating a low percentage of young people.

In the table below showing the percentage of the population aged 0 – 14 years old. We see that the top twenty countries are all in Africa. While the countries with the lowest percentage of young people are all in Europe or Asia.

A close-up of Africa showing the high levels of green across the continent. Notable exceptions include South Africa and North Africa.

Data from the Population pyramid shows a similar story with young people making up huge numbers at the bottom of the pyramid, in sharp contrast to Europe.

Conclusion

We can see the trends that Europe and Asia will continue to shrink in population as they are the oldest of an aging world while Africa grows larger and larger.

I hope you found this interesting and maybe you’d enjoy my other blog posts.