UNFPA's Contribution to Meeting the MDGs:
Findings from the United Nations Millennium Project

Population Dynamics

The United Nations Millennium Project found strong links between rapid population growth, high fertility, ill-timed pregnancies and poverty – a demographic-related poverty trap. Demographic trends affect both development prospects and security.

Additional information and sources:

• “Impoverished people living in rural areas have the highest fertility rates and the largest families. Rapid population growth and shrinking farm sizes make rural poverty worse. Poor people (in rural and urban areas) have less access to information and services to space or limit their pregnancies in accord with their preferences…[Overcoming the poverty trap] is helped by a voluntary reduction in fertility, which promotes greater investments in the health, nutrition, and education of each child. We thus strongly support programs that promote sexual and reproductive health and rights, including voluntary family planning,” according to Investing in Development (page 35).

• “Poorer countries are more likely to have demographic regimes marked by high fertility and high mortality, resulting in low adult-to-child ratios. Such demographic profiles are also associated with greater conflict risks. Indeed since 1945 almost every instance of massive one-sided violence (genocide or politicide) has occurred in countries with more than a two-to-one child-adult ratio,” according to Investing in Development (Box 3.4 page 48).

• “Each region's prospects for progress toward the goals are affected by its demographic conditions. Sub-Saharan Africa is confronted by continuing high population growth, youthful populations, low contraceptive prevalence and high unmet need for family planning. Western Asia has the second fastest growing population. Less severe demographic constraints affect South Asia and Southeast Asia, but the unmet need for family planning and maternal health services remains considerable. Latin American and the Caribbean's prospects are affected by the dramatic inequality of access to family planning and safe motherhood services between wealthier and poorer social groups. Several European CIS countries face population declines because of low fertility and migration. Countries nearing the end of their demographic transitions will need to pay special attention to the coming needs of aging populations. Many regions are being affected, positively and negatively by migration.” From Investing in Development (page 22).

• Investing in Development also calls for the strengthening of statistical capacity at the country-level “to run population and housing census, conduct household surveys, set up vital statistics and health information systems, and compile indicators on food agriculture, education, and the economy among other areas.” From Investing in Development (page 107).

• Chapter 3 – Box 3.4 (“The poverty-conflict nexus”) of Investing in Development proposes reasons for the strong bidirectional linkages between poverty and conflict, including demography and social structures.