I somehow lost most of March to spending two weeks helping with my cousin's school play, so here's a cross-post of an essay I originally wrote for Tumblr.
The White Tower estimates that 1-2% of the population has the ability to channel, but seems to have no firm estimate of the fraction of that 1-2% who will channel whether they try to or not. There are a few sets of information which offer possible formulae for working this out.
Wilder and "Sparker" Aes Sedai
There are 15 or 16 named Aes Sedai known either to be wilders or to have had the spark inborn, although many "sparkers" who are not wilders are established only in the Companion. The 15 or 16 reflects the uncertain status of Saerin Ansobar, who is listed on the Wiki as a wilder, but may be so classified only because she was initially trained by the Daughters of Silence rather than by Aes Sedai. There are additionally four present-day Aes Sedai known or strongly suspected to be from Far Madding, who it seems unlikely could have discovered their ability to channel without possessing the Spark, given that they could not channel in Far Madding itself and would not have been encouraged to seek testing or try to channel on their own. For the purposes of our estimates, we will assume that Saerin Ansobar is a true wilder - with numbers so small and uncertain, any potential inaccuracy this introduces will be dwarfed by the potential inaccuracy introduced by the sheer volume of what we do not and cannot know. Results will be figured with and without the Far Maddingers for comparison.
If we assume that every Aes Sedai with the spark inborn is named and identified as such at some point in the series, this would give us 16 or 20 sisters out of roughly 950 living Aes Sedai at start of series. Estimated population with the spark inborn: 1.7 to 2.1% of women who can channel, 0.02 to 0.03% of the total human population.
If instead we assume these 16 or 20 named Aes Sedai with the spark are representative of the roughly 277 named Aes Sedai in the series, we instead have 5.8 to 7.2% of women who can channel, and 0.08 to 0.1% of the human population.
Watch Hill Novices
In The Shadow Rising, Alanna and Verin report having found four girls in Watch Hill who can be taught to channel, and one who may have the spark inborn. If she does (they cannot tell for certain given her age), and if these numbers are in proportion to the general population, that would make for 1 in 5 women who can channel, 20%, and about 0.3% of people. This is, of course, a nice round number, and has fewer uncertainties than estimates based on Aes Sedai, but five is not a good sample size.
Suldam and Damane
There are 30 named Sul'dam in the series, and 22 named Damane from Seanchan. In the unlikely event that these numbers are in proportion, this would mean that 42.3% of women who can channel have the spark inborn. This is ridiculous on the face of it, especially as we are told explicitly that there are always "many" more sul'dam than damane.
The Shaido In The Fires of Heaven, the Shaido have about 160,000 spears, although some number of these are mera'din. Together, the forces of the other 11 clans seem to represent about 480,000 men and maidens, which would make for about 43,600 per clan. However, Couladin brought the entire clan across the dragonwall, while the other clans did not commit themselves so thoroughly. If we assume that each of the eleven non-Shaido clans committed roughly half their available forces, and that roughly five percent of the warriors of each non-Shaido clan were mera'din and thus among Couladin's men instead of their own clans', we might reasonably place the actual population of Shaido warriors at very, very roughly 100,000 spears. I believe it is established somewhere, that the Shaido are one of the larger clans (along with the Goshien and Taardad), so this feels pretty reasonable. (Number of septs has not been taken into consideration here, as the Shaido have more than 8 times as many septs as any other clan, and their population clearly is not that much larger. It is to be assumed that the Shaido have smaller septs for some reason.) This would put the adult population of the Shaido in the neighborhood of 200,000. (At least half again as many are children, but we can ignore them for these purposes since they cannot channel). Of course, we will need to divide this by two again immediately to get the population of women, taking us back to 100,000, assuming maidens of the spear are roughly balanced by blacksmiths, very old men, and other adult male noncombatants.
In Crossroads of Twilight, it is established that when the Shaido crossed the Dragonwall, they had "fewer than five hundred" (by implication, more than four hundred) Wise Ones who could channel, and perhaps 50 apprentices who could do so, making the total number of Shaido Wise Ones who can channel very close to 500. All Aiel women who have the Spark inborn are trained as Wise Ones, and as far as I can tell, no effort is made to identify girls who could learn but do not have the spark. This would indicate that 500 out of 100,000 Shaido Women have the spark inborn, making for about 0.5% of their population, and about one third of those who could learn to channel. I confess to a certain degree of surprise at this figure. Even if we assume that the mera'din do not contribute a significant portion of the Shaido forces in Cairhien, and that their real adult population is more like 320,000, making for 160,000 women, this makes those with the spark inborn about 0.3% of the population and almost 21% of those who can channel or learn to do so. Remarkably, this seems to corroborate the proportions implied by our laughably small sample of girls from Watch Hill.
Limitations
The Aes Sedai figures are a bit of a mess. It is established in Beonin's perspective in Knife of Dreams that the Tower tends to focus on "bringing in girls born with the spark, and those already on the brink of channeling through their own fumbling". We know almost nothing about the personal histories of most Aes Sedai. This Beonin perspective is the only place in the text to firmly establish that some girls without the spark learn to channel without formal training, and there is nothing to tell us what their outcomes are like. Channeling sickness is endemic to the Westlands, and it is difficult to estimate how this has affected the population of Aes Sedai with the Spark inborn. That only about two thirds of women who can channel are strong enough to attain the shawl leaves another substantial number of women, some of them Tower trained, unaccounted for.
The 1-2% figure for the portion of the population who can channel (averaged in all calculations above to 1.5%) is from The World of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time, and it is possible that this figure is simply incorrect. World of (or the implied author thereof), believes this number to have be consistent between the Age of Legends and the present day, but in the Rhuidean flashbacks, Coumin was passed over at age ten because he "lacked the spark". It is to be assumed that the Aes Sedai of the Age of Legends could accurately identify the ability to channel in children that young, perhaps using a ter'angreal as the Seanchan do in the present day, but the use of the word "spark" here suggests the possibility that those who did not have the spark inborn were not identified or taught in the Age of Legends, and not included among their estimates for the portion of the population who could channel. This would mean that, unless something has changed, 1-2% of the total population have the spark inborn, meaning that, at the highest end, it is possible that as much as 10% of the population could learn to channel. For a sense of the scale here, Andor has a population of roughly 10 million. Allowing that half of them are men, that 75% of those with the Spark inborn die (we will assume for mathematical tidiness that none of these are found and trained before it's too late), and that 37.5% are not strong enough to meet the Tower's criteria for the Shawl, if the White Tower found and trained all of them, this would produce a bit over 300,000 Aes Sedai from Andor alone, compared to the 950 Aes Sedai from the entire Westlands that actually exist. However, it is equally possible that only the da'shain Aiel needed the spark inborn to qualify for training (there is tenuous evidence for this in current Aiel practices), or that the Aes Sedai of the Age of Legends did not use the word "spark" the same way it is used in the present day.
It is possible that some girls who become Wise Ones for other reasons (such as a Talent for dreaming) subsequently discover that they can learn to channel and are taught, but it is not clear whether such discovery would occur in the natural course of their training, nor whether the Wise Ones are aware that a girl without the spark even can be taught.
Figures for the Shaido adult population are, of course, somewhat imprecise. I don't think there's anything seriously wrong with them, but I could easily have missed something.
Conclusions
The true percentage of people who can channel who have the spark inborn is almost certainly not less than 2%. Estimates using White Tower data would likely put it in the neighborhood of 5%. However, the Shaido figures call this into question, and it seems uncomfortably likely that the true figure is in fact around 20%. Certainly, it could not realistically be higher.
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