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Every year, about $90 billion flows back to Africa from its diaspora. We're very good at counting the money.

Here's what we never counted: how many of those people actually want to come home, and just can't find the door.

Turns out, a lot of them. We ran the experiment last year, and the interest floored us.

So now, we’ve built the Building Back Home newsletter.

It’s a fortnightly newsletter for Africans abroad who are done thinking about moving back and ready to actually do it. Every issue, we’ll bring you real jobs across the continent, fellowships worth your time, and one honest story from someone who already made the leap: what worked, and what nobody warned them about.

It’ll open the door between the talent out there and the opportunity back here.

If that's you, sign up! →

Now, to properly start today’s edition, let’s go back in time.

Across Africa, that is not a joke. It is the daily reality of how the continent measures itself.

Let’s start with the simplest number there is. 

Nigeria is home to about 242 million people, or so every headline says. 

That figure was never counted. It is a UN projection based on a 2006 census, the last one the country managed to complete.. 

A fresh count was scheduled for 2023, and then postponed with no new date set. 

So the population of Africa's largest country is, in plain terms, an educated guess that is now almost twenty years old.

This matters because everything else is built on that guess. 

And once you notice it, you start seeing it everywhere.

In 2014, Nigeria recalculated its GDP, and the number jumped 89% in a single day, from about $270 billion to $510 billion. 

Nothing changed on the ground, and no factories appeared overnight. 

The statisticians had simply been using a 1990 snapshot and ignoring whole industries that had grown up since, including telecoms, Nollywood, and retail. 

When they finally counted those, the economy turned out to be nearly twice the size they had been reporting. 

The Economist ran the headline “How Nigeria's economy grew by 89% overnight.” 

The country became Africa's largest economy on a spreadsheet, passing South Africa without producing a single extra good.

Ghana did the same thing in 2010 and nearly doubled its GDP, which moved it into middle-income status in a day. 

Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, and Uganda all found between 13% and 28% more economy when they updated their methods. 

When Nigeria rebased again in 2025, the economy grew another 30% on paper, this time because the statisticians started counting the informal traders and home businesses they had missed before.

Now let’s go smaller, to something you would think is easy to measure: electricity. 

You cannot bill people for power without knowing how much they used. 

Yet in 2020, about 60% of Nigeria's electricity customers had no meter. 

Their bills were invented through a process the regulator calls estimated billing, which means someone guesses your usage and charges you for it. 

Four years later, in 2024, more than half were still unmetered. 

A country that cannot measure the power flowing into a home has little hope of measuring much else about that home.

This pattern repeats itself in many parts of Africa. 

The thing being measured is real, but the measurement is a guess. 

And the guess can be wrong by amounts large enough to rewrite a country’s trajectory.

A population figure is a denominator. 

It sits at the bottom of almost every statistic a country produces. 

GDP per person, the poverty rate, doctors per thousand, school places needed, internet users: each one is a real-ish number on top divided by a guessed number underneath. 

If the denominator’s wrong, every other figure is wrong too. 

But it gets more concrete than that. 

You cannot build a clinic for a town if you do not know the town is there, or how many people live in it. 

You cannot size a water system, a road, or a power line for a population you are estimating from a wrong model. 

When a disease outbreak hits, the response is planned against a headcount nobody is sure of, which is how vaccines end up sent to the wrong places in the wrong amounts.

So the people who actually run things often stop trusting the data. 

They lean on instinct and on what they can see in front of them. 

That works for a trader judging her own street. But it fails for a health ministry planning across a state, or an investor sizing a market, because instinct does not scale, and it cannot be checked.

The easy assumption is that African governments simply are not counting. That is not the story.

Nigeria has tried for sixty years, and the trying is the problem. 

Its census results decide how federal money and political seats are shared between regions. That turns a headcount into a contest. 

In 1963, a recount conveniently discovered 8.5 million extra people in the north. Another count in 1973  was reportedly so rigged that the results were never published. 

The 1991 census drew more than 100 court cases. 

When a bigger number means more money and more power, the number stops being a measurement and becomes a negotiation.

Elsewhere, the barrier is access, not politics. 

The Democratic Republic of Congo last ran a census in 1984, more than forty years ago. 

The Central African Republic's last real attempt was a partial one in 2008. 

Chad leans on estimates because conflict around the Lake Chad basin has cut off whole regions. 

It’s worth noting that this problem isn’t universal to all of Africa.

It’s often clustered around a few big countries instead. 

About  47 of 54 African countries took part in the most recent global census round, and South Africa, Egypt, and Morocco run solid, regular counts. 

But the census is only the loud half of the problem. The quiet half is worse. A census is a photo taken once a decade. 

What a country really needs is the live feed: a running record of every birth and every death.

That feed barely exists across most of the continent. 

Only about ten African countries register 90% or more of births.

In Ethiopia, the figure sits near 3%. 

The result is that across much of Africa, a person can be born, live a full life, and die without the state recording any of it. 

The census is then forced to rebuild from scratch, every ten years, a number that should just add up on its own.

Here is the good news. You no longer need a perfect census to get a usable count. 

A handful of methods now use technology to estimate populations, and they are faster and cheaper than counting heads.

The clearest proof came out of Nigeria's fight against polio. 

Vaccination teams in the north noticed their hand-drawn maps were wrong. 

Settlements were misplaced, misnamed, or missing entirely. 

Working with a Nigerian organisation called eHealth Africa and a programme named GRID3, they combined high-resolution satellite images, machine learning, and local surveyors to redraw the maps of ten northern states. 

They turned up villages of up to a thousand people that had never appeared on any map.

eHealth Africa went on to map eleven states and track campaigns across 140,000 settlements.

Once teams could see where people actually lived, the planning got real, and Nigeria was certified free of wild polio in 2020.

The engine behind that work is now general-purpose. 

WorldPop, a research group at the University of Southampton, builds population maps from the bottom up. 

It takes a small ground survey, adds satellite-detected buildings, and uses statistics to fill in the rest, producing an estimate for every 100-metre square metres of a country. 

Where official building data is thin, Google's Open Buildings and Meta's settlement maps supply machine-read outlines of nearly every structure on the continent.

A different method skips buildings and follows phones. 

A group called Flowminder estimates where people are, and how they move, from the anonymous call records that mobile operators already generate for billing. 

The approach tracked population movement during the West African Ebola outbreak and has been used to find unvaccinated children across Somalia, Sudan, and Ethiopia. 

Buildings tell you where people sleep. Phones tell you where they spend their days.

Governments are starting to build the live feed, too. 

Rwanda now wires every birth and death recorded in a hospital straight into one national registry and plans to issue an ID from the moment a person is born. 

It is the opposite of a once-a-decade census: a count that updates itself.

Now, this isn’t to say tech-enabled methods get us a perfect headcount. They don’t.

Satellites count roofs, not people. 

A model guesses how many people sit under each roof, and that guess carries real error, often 15% to 30% at a local level. 

So the technology gives you a second opinion that is faster and cheaper than a census, but it does not hand you the absolute truth.

That is still a real gain.

A perfect headcount of everyone, taken every few years, costs a fortune and gets fought over before the results are even out. 

The new tools offer something more useful in practice: a good-enough estimate that can be refreshed often and cheaply, without waiting a decade.

That is the real shift. 

For most of its history, Africa has tried to count everyone once, perfectly, and mostly failed. 

The smarter goal is to estimate everyone often, well enough to act on. 

And thanks to technology, that may now be within reach. And the solutioneering for Africa can go from guesswork to smartwork.

What do you think about Africa’s counting problem? Let me know here.

That’s it for this week. See you on Sunday for a breakdown on This Week in African Tech.

Cheers,

The Tech Safari Team

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