Two out of five Sudanese are under fifteen
اثنان من كل خمسة سودانيين دون الخامسة عشرة
2026-07-26
Sudan's median age is about 19. Line up the whole country by age and the person in the middle has not finished secondary school.
Roughly 40 percent of the population is under fifteen. Every year several hundred thousand young people reach working age, and the economy has to find room for them.
Demographers call this a youth bulge. It can become a dividend if schooling and jobs keep pace, or a source of strain if they do not. Which way it goes is not written in the data. It is decided by policy, year after ordinary year.
What the pyramid looks like
Stack Sudan's population by age and you get a shape closer to a pyramid than the barrel most rich countries show. The base, ages zero to fourteen, is enormous; each five-year band above it is smaller than the one below. That geometry is destiny in slow motion: today's ten-year-olds are 2035's job seekers and 2045's parents, and there are a lot of them.
The arithmetic of classrooms and first jobs
A country where roughly two in five people are children needs to build school places at extraordinary speed just to stand still. Sudan's basic-education enrolment has climbed for decades, but the absolute number of children keeps climbing too, so the finish line moves. The same logic hits the labour market a decade later: several hundred thousand new entrants a year, in an economy where formal jobs are scarce and agriculture still absorbs much of the workforce.
Dividend or strain: what tips the balance
Economists talk about the demographic dividend: the windfall that arrives when a big young generation reaches working age while the number of dependants per worker falls. East Asia rode exactly this wave from the 1970s. But the dividend is a possibility, not a promise. It pays out only where children reach adulthood educated, healthy and employable. Where they do not, the same bulge shows up instead as unemployment, emigration pressure and political volatility. Sudan's next twenty years will be decided far more by school budgets and job creation than by the birth rate itself, which is already easing.
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