Country Comments

Chad is one of the world’s poorest countries with the fifth highest fertility rate. With an average of nearly six children per mother the country is adding 450,000 more citizens a year. The current population and consumption levels are borderline sustainable with the country’s available resources.

However with its current fertility rate it will very quickly begin to exceed the carrying capacity of the country. Chad along with Niger have the world’s lowest median age of marriage among girls (around 16 years old) together with Mali — among the highest rates of adolescent births. In these three countries, 36–40% of women give birth before they are 18 years old. (1) The government of Chad has committed to increase its extremely low modern contraceptive utilization. The development of a National Sexual Health Strategy for Adolescents and Youth in 2018 points to positive action.

Most of Chad’s population is concentrated in pockets of the west and the more verdant south, where rising populations are driving malnutrition and unnecessary deaths of mothers and infants as well as creating environmental pressures such as overfishing, overgrazing and farming and desertification of agricultural land.

(1) https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03445-z