Population and Health

Key Facts & Trends

Health and welfare in developing nations are closely connected with population pressures and access to reproductive health and contraceptive services. Developing nations or areas with high fertility rates and limited access to family planning services—such as South Asia and sub-Saharan African—suffer from a host of problems that affect community, maternal and child health.

 

  • Recent findings on maternal mortality by WHO, UNICEF and UNFPA show that a woman living in sub-Saharan Africa has a 1 in 16 chance of dying in pregnancy or childbirth, compared to a 1 in 2,800 risk for a woman from a developed region.
  • Every year, half a million women in Africa and Asia die from pregnancy-related causes and more than one million children are left motherless.
  • Every year more than 10 million children die before reaching the age of five, half of them from malnutrition. A child born less than 18 months after a sibling has a death rate that is two to four times higher than that of a child born after a 36-month interval.
  • While the world currently has enough food, many nations continue to suffer from hunger.  One in nearly seven people in the world are going hungry; one in three children are underweight.
  • The 2004 FAO Food Insecurity Report found that childhood and maternal under-nutrition cost an estimated 220 million disability-adjusted years (DALYs) as a result of premature death and disability.
  • While the U.N. recently issued lower, revised estimates for the number of people infected with AIDS, an estimated 33.2 million people are still living with HIV/AIDS worldwide.  In 2006, an estimated 2.5 million people became newly infected with HIV.  The major source of HIV transmission worldwide is heterosexual sex.  Countries impacted by the AIDS epidemic are experiencing sharp increase in mortality and a decrease in life expectancy. More than two million people a year die from AIDS, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa.
     
     
     
     
     

Policy Implications

Population pressures and high fertility rates in sub-Saharan Africa and in many part of South Asia are slowing progress toward much needed improvements in maternal and child health.

 

  • In much of the world public health is improving, but in many parts of South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa—particularly in areas with high fertility rates and/or shortages of food—progress is halting or non-existent.
  • The UN Millenium Goals set the target of reducing the under-five child mortality rate by two-thirds between 1990 and 2015 and the maternal mortality ratio by three quarters, but attainment of those goals—particularly in sub-Saharan Africa—is in jeopardy.
  • Access to reproductive health services is critical to improving maternal health and halting the AIDS epidemic, but an estimated 200 million women who want access to reproductive services do not have them because they lack information or the support of their husbands and communities. 
  • The AIDS epidemic is overwhelming public health systems in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, making those areas more vulnerable to the outbreak of other infectious diseases.