The reason that countries that have high population growth tend to be poor is because when a country gets rich its people have fewer children. The high fertility rate does not cause the poverty, instead its the other way around: the poverty causes the high fertility rate.
There must be a feedback loop that incentivizes to get better education, to get better productivity to get richer. Raising a child is expensive, raising a highly educated child is very expensive. If you have 8 children then you can barely feed them unless you are very rich indeed. Even if you manage to provide good education for few of your children then the larger part of them continues the poverty loop. Breaking out of poverty requires breaking of this loop.
It should be very obvious - if your economy grows 5% but your population grows 10% then everybody is getting poorer as the growth per capita is negative. The same applies for everything, education, sanitation, food production. If you capacity to provide any of them is lower than the population growth then the amount of the poor continues to increase.
And Russia is probably not playing with the grain shortage. They had an agreement in place to let the country they are at war with sell grain because it's so critical.
It's probably more complicated than that and a tangent.
Russia certainly used the risk of hunger as a weapon to increase political pressure on Ukraine on the international level. Fortunately that attempt didn't play out and Russia was instead pressurized to make concessions. But they stopped the agreement the same moment they thought that it is not beneficial for them anymore. But this is just a side topic and was given as an example how the African incapacity to keep up with the population growth has wider geopolitical implications.
There was a time when HN was more conversational than it typically seems these days. It gets hard to assume someone is making conversation rather than making an argument when the default seems to be the latter.
If the societies are fragile (vulnerable to drought, markets, or violence), or rotting (corruption, superstition, tribalism), even great infrastructure can make for subpar growth.
An analogy I always think of are Wadis (dry riverbeds); in very dry places with little rainfall (like Hudaydah in Yemen / Saudi Arabia), when it DOES rain, the dry dirt riverbeds don't soak up any water and transport it all out in flash floods - but it IS possible (and has been done) to invest in the land's ability to hold that water rather than purge it. Similarly, in a "always-developing" society, there'd have to be a investment in the people to ensure they can benefit from solutions to their issues.
Population growth tends to stop with adequate education plus reproductive rights for women. Development isn't just about infrastructure. It's also about culture, education, developing the local population so they can sustain a more developed society.
My recollection: water.org was started by a man who went to Africa with a medical charity, concluded that a lot of the health issues they were treating were directly caused by lack of clean water, decided we should fix that.
We already invest in other countries, just not necessarily wisely. Advanced surgery being brought to primitive conditions is more about people wanting to feel heroic than about really improving things.
UN prediction for Africa is that they fall close to the reproduction threshold for the end of century. Until that the poverty trap will continue. It also means that by that time now 4 billion people require their needs satisfied instead.
But the population growth has been huge and exponential. From 200 million to 4 billion in 150 years is an incredible amount of growth.
Opinions are divided: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP8CzlFhc14#t=3m>
If anything, the argument is a nationalistic one, and nationalism have traditionally been associated with the right, not the left.