– credit Ben Iwara for Unsplash +
You can measure human progress by GDP, by employment rates, home-ownership, or average national income, but when you’re lying in your bed and it’s time to pay the piper, it’s difficult not to see the most important measure as years of life on the planet.
The annual report from the WHO for 2026 included the findings of another report which looked at African mortality statistics between 2000 and 2019 and found that on average the continent gained 10 years of additional life expectancy and 9 years of healthy life expectancy.
In 2000, the average African could be expected to lead a healthy life until 46 when illness and disability crippled their remaining years. In 2019 that decline was most commonly seen at 55.
Also in 2019, the average life expectancy rose to 64, though some nations, like Algeria and Tunisia, saw far higher numbers, and in fact today have life expectancies that rival American states.
Much of this is, to report honestly, driven by a reduction in child mortality and an increase in the number of children living past age 5. Each early childhood death dramatically skews life expectancy data downward, and improvements in reproductive and maternity health have made a world of difference.
However, even as general medical standards increased, the lion’s share of the improvements in life expectancy come from increased controls on TB, malaria, and HIV, with particular credit going to increased access to antiretroviral medication to counter the AIDS epidemic.
All over Africa, children have much better odds of not only surviving to grow up, but to grow up with both parents alive and able to help them. It means citizens remain productive workers longer, and parents are surviving to be grandparents, keeping families and communities more intact for longer.
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It should also be emphasized that this period overlaps with quite a few catastrophes, including wars and conflicts like those in Sudan, Somalia, DRC, Libya, and Angola; with famines like the one in East Africa in 2011, economic collapses like the one in Zimbabwe in 2009, epidemics like Ebola and AIDS, militant insurgencies like the one in the Sahel, and political collapses like those seen across particularly West Africa.
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