Keywords: Tropical Africa, Rwanda, birth rate, demography, population growth, Sustainable Development Goals The threat of a population explosion was "well known" in the 1970s, when the Nobel Prize-winning physician Paul Ehrlich wrote his famous "Population Bomb"1. Since then, most countries have successfully completed the demographic transition and have more or less stabilized their population (or at least significantly slowed its growth). Accordingly, programmes aimed at reducing demographic growth have all but disappeared from the international aid agenda for developing countries. The priority and funding of family planning extension programmes in developing countries2 has been sharply reduced. By now, there is a growing awareness that the curtailment of international aid activities in this area was premature. As the American demographer S. Bernstein famously pointed out, " the race to reduce population growth was essentially declared over before anyone even crossed the finish line."3. Indeed, the demographic statistics of recent years strongly suggest that it is premature to claim that the problem of population growth has been solved, since in a number of countries (especially in Tropical Africa), the population continues to grow at a very rapid pace - faster than the world's population has ever grown at all! This problem is compounded by the accumulated inertia of population growth: even if the birth rate falls to the level of simple reproduction in the near future (which in itself is almost impossible and governments will have to make very significant efforts to achieve such a result in the coming decades), the population will continue to grow by inertia for a long time-as numerous cohorts of modern children grow up and become a large generation of parents. For example, Tanzania, which had a population of approximately 50 million in 2013, caught up with Russia in terms of the number of children aged 0-4 years - approximately 8.5 million - in the same year4. The ... Read more