Africa’s Causes of Death, 2021
My latest explorable data story breaks down the causes of death in Africa, drawn from the World Health Organization’s Global Health Estimates 2021.
As DRC and Uganda work to contain the latest Ebola outbreak, it’s worth remembering the quieter killers too. The communicable and non-communicable diseases that take far more lives across the continent every year, with none of the headlines.
Have a look, and poke at the numbers yourself. There are two versions.
1. The data story. A scrolling read on what 8.3 million deaths in 2021 looked like, age band by age band.
2. The explorable version. The same numbers with no narrative. Every cause of death the WHO tracks, sized by its share of deaths. Click a block to zoom in, hover to see the age breakdown, or search for a cause by name.
Watch the film
Prefer to watch? Here is a three-minute narrated film of the same data, from the Ebola headlines to the 8.3 million deaths that rarely make the news.
The narration is an AI voice (Google Gemini).
Notes and Sources
- Data: World Health Organization, Global Health Estimates 2021: Deaths by Cause, Age, Sex, by Country and by Region, 2000–2021 (2024). Licensed CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO.
- The figures cover the 47 countries of the WHO African Region, which leaves out Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, Sudan, Somalia and Djibouti (WHO counts them in its Eastern Mediterranean Region).
- There is also a nine-minute narrated film of the same data, where every dot is 1,000 people.
- First posted on LinkedIn in July 2026.