African life expectancy has risen sharply
Five charts to start your day
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CHART 1 • African life expectancy has risen sharply
A chart like this is worth pausing over because it pushes against the easiest story about Africa. The long-run picture is not only crisis. It is millions of lives extended year by year.
The upward movement reflects vaccination, malaria control, lower child mortality, better food security, urbanisation, basic medicine and public-health systems reaching more people than before. Some countries still lag badly, but the direction is unmistakable.
Life expectancy is an average, not a guarantee of good lives. War, poverty and weak healthcare still matter enormously. The point is not to soften reality. It is to remember that African development has also produced one of the great human gains of the modern era.
Source: Information is beautiful
Some charts are valuable because they interrupt the news cycle. They remind us that the world is not only moving from crisis to crisis, even when the headlines make it feel that way.
That slower view changes the texture of the week. Health services, food production, migration and travel choices all become part of the same human pattern: adaptation under pressure, but adaptation all the same.
