Africa

Not enough to compensate for everywhere else plus even there most countries are tapering off.

[citation needed]

Every source I've looked at shows a drop in fertility.

Birth rate is a somewhat ambiguous term. Does it mean number of births? Or does it mean number of births per person?

You're talking about fertility rate, which is number of births per person. That's decreasing everywhere.

ayewo may have been talking about number of births. That is increasing in Africa, but even with Africa, is still decreasing in total worldwide:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-number-of-births-b...

I'm pretty sure birth rate is universally seen as a second order thing rather than a first order thing.

What are you referring to by "birth rate"? Are you referring to the general society-wide system of babies being born? Or are you referring to a specific metric relating to how many babies are born?

From definitions I find online, first order vs second order refers to systems. So if you're applying those adjectives to a specific metric, I'm not sure that's correct.

I don't think we can say that people "universally" agree about what metric the term "birth rate" should refer to, because different people in this thread are using the term to refer to different metrics. However, I do think that generally the term "birth rate" refers to the number of babies born per year (or other unit of time), and the term "fertility rate" refers to the number of babies born per woman. Fertility rate is actually somewhat more complicated than that, because it takes into account the different fertility rates for women of different ages, and then sums those together, to simulate how many children a woman would have who passes through all the different ages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birth_rate

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate

Not climbing coming down, but still high