UN Projects Continued Rapid Population Growth in Developing Countries – PAI Stresses Wider Access to Reproductive Health Care Essential to Future of 9.1 Billion, Fewer AIDS Deaths

February 24, 2005

Washington, DC — Despite a widening debate in some industrialized countries over population aging and decline, new United Nations projections demonstrate that population continues to grow rapidly in much of the world and that the HIV/AIDS pandemic is far from cresting, Population Action International (PAI) noted on Thursday.

“Even the United Nations’ new projected world population of 9.1 billion in 2050 assumes that governments will come through on past commitments to make family planning and other reproductive health services much more widely available to those who seek them,” said Robert Engelman, vice president for research at PAI. “Business as usual would yield even more rapid growth in the next 45 years, tragically offset in some countries by high death rates from HIV/AIDS.”

In the “2004 Revision” of its World Population Prospects, the United Nations Population Division indicates that 95 percent of all population growth is taking place in the developing world, with the most rapid growth taking place in the world’s poorest places. The report also finds that 25 years into the HIV/AIDS pandemic, roughly one-third of the world’s countries are “highly affected” by the disease, as evidenced by increased mortality and plummeting life expectancies.

“Clearly, the work of meeting the demand for family planning services and helping people protect themselves against HIV is far from finished,” Engelman said. “The world’s governments need to make much more progress in the future to reach all women and men everywhere with services and supplies that allow them to time and space births, as they see fit, in good health.”

In 1994, fully 179 of the world’s governments committed to a plan to make universally available family planning and other reproductive health services  — such as maternal health care and prevention of sexually transmitted infections, including HIV/AIDS — by 2015. In the decade since, however, donor governments have fallen short of their promises, and would need to increase more than three-fold their investments to reach this goal, according to Progress and Promises: Trends in International Assistance for Reproductive Health and Population, a report released by PAI in late 2004.