Sub-Saharan Africa doubled its grain, mostly by farming more land
Change in cereal land and in grain per hectare, 2002–04 to 2022–24 averages, countries over 1 million tonnes.
- 1. By 2100, more than 1 in 3 people will be African
- 2. Nearly half the world's under-25s will be African by 2100
- 3. DR Congo is projected to outgrow the US by 2100
- 4. Kinshasa will soon be bigger than Paris and London combined
- 5. Two-thirds of the world's mobile money moves in Africa
- 6. Volcanic heat makes nearly 45% of the power Kenya generates
- 7. Africa's solar imports more than doubled since early 2024
- 8. DR Congo mines three-quarters of the world's cobalt
- 9. Nearly two in three people in Africa are still offline
- 10. Africa formally recycles less than 1% of its e-waste
- 11. Ethiopia added over a third of Africa's new renewable power
- 12. Nigeria's cities now hold more people than Japan's
- 13. Sudan now has the world's most people displaced at home
- 14. Nigeria now has almost 25 million more people than Brazil
- 15. Six of the ten fastest-growing big cities are African
- 16. Africa now has more hungry people than Asia
- 17. Six in ten child deaths now happen in sub-Saharan Africa
- 18. Rwanda spread electricity faster than any country since 2014
- 19. Nigeria now eats more rice than Japan
- 20. More sub-Saharan Africans now have mobile money than bank accounts
- 21. Sub-Saharan Africa's cities now hold more people than Latin America's
- 22. DR Congo tripled its copper mining in ten years
- 23. Nitrogen dioxide over Khartoum fell 39% after war began
- 24. Countries mostly without electricity fell from 33 to 15
- 25. Seven in ten West African mobile money accounts sit idle
- 26. Nigeria became the third-biggest sender of students abroad
- 27. Guinea overtook Australia as the world's biggest bauxite miner
- 28. DR Congo passed Chile in refined copper
- 29. Burkina Faso now sends half its exports to the UAE
- 30. Nouakchott's mobile internet sped from Africa's slowest to top 30
- 31. Nigeria now imports more solar panels than generators
- 32. Zimbabwe climbed to fourth among the world's lithium miners
- 33. Services now employ twice as many Ghanaian women as farms
- 34. Sub-Saharan Africa doubled its grain, mostly by farming more land
Share of the region's extra 92.7 million tonnes of grain that came from farming more land, by our split; 44% came from higher yields.
Sub-Saharan countries that grew their harvest mostly on new land. Elsewhere it was 12 of 56.
Ethiopia's grain per hectare: it tripled its harvest mostly by farming better, a path most of the region has yet to take.
the numbers & method
Claim types Fact · Interpretation
World Bank, World Development Indicators (data from FAO), indicators AG.PRD.CREL.MT (cereal production, tonnes) and AG.YLD.CREL.KG (cereal yield, kg per harvested hectare), read from the World Bank API (api.worldbank.org/v2, last updated 8 Oct 2026). Each value is the average of three years, 2002–04 and 2022–24, to smooth out weather. Countries shown: every country with all six years of both series and over 1 million tonnes a year in 2022–24 (108 countries) plus the World Bank's Sub-Saharan Africa aggregate. Derived values (progrss calculation): cereal land = production ÷ yield; % change in land and in yield between the two periods. Production = land × yield, so the change splits exactly into a land part and a yield part (log-mean Divisia method): Sub-Saharan Africa's harvest rose from 95.4 to 188.0 million tonnes (×1.97); land ×1.47, yield ×1.35, so 56% of the extra 92.7 Mt came from more land (52.2 Mt) and 44% from higher yields. India: 13% land, 87% yield. Ethiopia: harvest ×3.30, land ×1.50, yield ×2.19, so 34% land and 66% yield. Of the 25 Sub-Saharan countries in the chart whose harvest grew, 18 grew more by land than by yield; elsewhere 12 of 56. Cereals = wheat, rice (paddy), maize, barley, oats, rye, millet, sorghum, buckwheat and mixed grains; land is harvested area, so double-cropping counts twice. Takeaway 3 is an interpretation. Licence: WDI CC BY 4.0.
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