Fast Facts

• Nearly half of all people are under the age of 25.

• Some 1.2 billion people are between the ages of 10 and 19. Eighty-seven per cent of these adolescents live in developing countries.

HIV/AIDS

• An estimated 6,000 youth each day become infected with HIV — one every 14 seconds. The majority are young women.

• At the end of 2001, an estimated 11.8 million young people aged 15-24 were living with HIV/AIDS. Only a small percentage of these young people know they are HIV-positive.

• More than 13 million children under age 15 have lost one or both parents to AIDS. The overwhelming majority of these AIDS orphans live in Africa. By 2010, their number is projected to reach 25 million.

• An estimated 7.3 million young women are living with HIV/AIDS, compared to 4.5 million young men. Two thirds of newly infected youth aged 15-19 in sub-Saharan Africa are female.

Early marriage and childbearing

• Despite a shift toward later marriage in many parts of the world, 82 million girls in developing countries who are now aged 10 to 17 will be married before their 18th birthday.

• In some countries, the majority of girls still marry before their 18th birthday. These include India (50 per cent), Nepal (60 per cent) and Niger (76 per cent).

• Worldwide, some 14 million women and girls between ages 15 and 19 — both married and unmarried — give birth each year.

• Pregnancy is a leading cause of death for young women aged 15 to 19 worldwide, with complications of childbirth and unsafe abortion being the major factors.

• For both physiological and social reasons, girls aged 15 to 19 are twice as likely to die in childbirth as those in their twenties. Girls under age 15 are five times as likely to die as those in their twenties.

Living on the margins

• The number of youth in the world surviving on less than a dollar a day in 2000 was an estimated 238 million, almost a quarter (22.5 per cent) of the world’s total youth population.

• South Asia has the largest concentration of young people in extreme poverty (106 million), followed by sub-Saharan Africa (60 million), East Asia and the Pacific (51 million) and Latin America and the Caribbean (15 million).

• Each day, 5,000 children become refugees, and one in every 230 persons in the world is a child or adolescent who has been forced to flee his or her home.

• In 2000, an estimated 300,000 soldiers under the age of 18 were involved in 30 conflicts around the world.

• Global estimates of street children vary from 100 million (half of them in Latin America) to 250 million, and their numbers are rapidly increasing.

• Approximately 4 million suicide attempts take the lives of more than 90,000 adolescents each year.

School and work

• An estimated 115 million children currently do not attend primary school. The majority — 57 per cent — are girls.

• About 57 million young men and 96 million young women aged 15-24 in developing countries cannot read or write.

• An estimated 141 million or 42 per cent of adolescents between the ages of 15 and 17 were engaged in work in 2000.

• Worldwide, an estimated 352 million children between ages 5 and 17 were economically active in 2000, over 246 million of them working illegally and nearly 171 million in hazardous conditions.

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