Although Pakistan’s population growth rate is decreasing, it is still one of the highest in the world. According to the UN’s latest World Fertility Report, Pakistan’s fertility rate has declined from six live births per woman in 1994 to 3.6 per woman in 2024. This rate is the second highest in South Asia after Afghanistan. At this rate our population would double by 2045.

It is pertinent to add here that due to the failure of family planning programs there was higher-than-anticipated intercensal population growth rates of 2.55 per cent between 2017 and 2023. This means that we added 110 million people to our population in 25 years, marking the highest growth rate in South Asia. Further, Pakistan is projected to become the third most populous nation in the world by 2050, surpassing the United States, Indonesia, Brazil, and Russia. The report also highlighted that countries such as Ethiopia, Nigeria, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, along with Pakistan, accounted for 43 percent of global births in 2024.

In its report, the UN has emphasised the importance of reducing adolescent birth rates through targeted interventions to alleviate social and economic pressures. The UN has also called for ending child marriages, improving sexual and reproductive healthcare access, and enhancing maternal care for young mothers. It has been recommended that governments should strengthen laws and enforcement mechanisms to protect the rights of girls and women.

Pakistan’s rapid population growth has serious implications for the coming generations who will be faced with increasing food shortages, water scarcity, and environmental challenges. The UN says that countries should take steps to address the issue to create healthier, more productive populations in order to ensure a sustainable future.

Over the years successive governments in Pakistan have tried to tackle population growth through various measures, including family planning programs, contraceptive distribution, and rural awareness raising campaigns. In this connection the cooperation of international bodies, like the UN Population Fund, has also been enlisted but the results have been far from satisfactory. Among the many factors behind this failure are cultural and religious barriers, gender inequality, limited access to education and lack of funds.

The Population Council and UNFPA’s report entitled Pakistan@2050 addressed demographic change, future projections, and the challenges and opportunities vis-à-vis Pakistan’s development landscape. The study gave details of the economic loss caused by high population growth in the last few decades: Pakistan’s GDP would have been 56pc higher if the population growth had been even half a percentage point lower since the 1980.

Incremental water and food shortages, high unemployment and a troubled economy paint a bleak future. A large proportion of our people lack education and skills to live a productive life. According to the report, 2.6m additional jobs are required annually between 2023 and 2050 for our growing population. The country faces challenges in absorbing the full workforce. Major structural changes are required to generate growth in manufacturing and agriculture to absorb the additional 65m Pakistanis who will enter the labour force in the next 25 years.

It is estimated that over 50pc of Pakistanis would be living in urban areas by 2050. The large volume of rural-to-urban migration is due more to the push of shrinking employment opportunities in agriculture and poverty than to the pull of better prospects in the urban areas. This means that there is no prospect of any sharp decline in the continuing high rates of fertility in cities and towns.

Bringing fertility down is the need of the hour. The Council of Common Interests has set the target of bringing fertility down to 2.2 replacement levels by 2030. Many countries in this region like Iran and Nepal and Bangladesh have achieved a decline in fertility of over one child in a decade. A recent Population Council report estimates that almost half of the pregnancies in Pakistan are unplanned and 3.8m end annually as abortions and 2m as unplanned births. This confirms that there is a huge gap between demand for and supply of family planning services for families in need of these.

One of the reasons why our family planning programme, launched as far back as the 1960s, has failed to achieve the desired results is resistance from religious elements. But we have the example of other deeply religious Muslim countries like Bangladesh and Iran, which have achieved significant reductions in their respective fertility growth rates. Bangladesh has been campaigning through clerics to extend service delivery in hard-to-reach areas. Remarkably, the contraceptive prevalence rate in that country is 62 percent. On the other hand, the use of modern contraceptives by women in Pakistan is said to be around 25 percent — the lowest among other Muslim nations.

In this connection it is important to strengthen laws and enforcement mechanisms to protect the rights of girls and women, including laws to ban child marriage and regulations that guarantee full and equal access to reproductive healthcare. Access to education can be the real catalyst for change because better educated women tend to have fewer children than less-educated or illiterate women and girls. Experts say that the situation would have been different had there been investment in female education. By running a vigorous campaign to increase access to voluntary family planning, Pakistan’s birth rate can be brought down to sustainable levels.