Overview: Asia & the Pacific

Extending from Iran on the fringe of West Asia to the myriad islands of the South Pacific, the region of Asia and the Pacific is home to roughly 60 per cent of the world’s people. In the past two decades, and spurred on more recently by the goals, targets and tenets of the ICPD Programme of Action and of the Millennium Declaration, Asia has made significant progress on both the social and economic fronts. Paralleling this progress has been a related rapid decline in the region’s average population growth rate. The current growth rate, 1.3 per cent, is the lowest in developing country regions and closely approximates the world average of 1.2 per cent.

And yet, five Asian countries — Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia and Pakistan — are projected to account for nearly 45 per cent of the world’s projected population growth between 2002 and 2050.

Significant progress has been made in most parts of the region, particularly in promoting reproductive health, reducing infant mortality, lowering crude birth and death rates, and markedly increasing life expectancy (which now averages over 65 years for the region as a whole).

Nonetheless, many countries in the region — including Afghanistan, Bhutan, Cambodia, India, Lao PDR, Nepal and Timor-Leste — continue to have maternal mortality ratios exceeding 400 per 100,000 live births; their infant and under–5 mortality rates are also high. The young age structure of the Pacific Island countries underscores the importance of responding to the special reproductive health needs of adolescents. There are also well over 600 million illiterate adults in Asia, the majority of them women. Persisting inequalities in gender and wealth distribution also continue to be serious deterrents to faster and more equitable social and economic development in the region.

The considerable success of many family planning and reproductive health programmes in Asia can be attributed to a number of factors, including early recognition of population-related problems; continued and in many cases growing political commitment; lack of strong imbedded religious obstacles; efforts to develop an appropriate health infrastructure; and the influx of substantial international technical and financial assistance. The transition to rights-based provision of information and services — as called for at the ICPD — is accelerating.

Asian governments are continuing to struggle with rapid urbanization, which poses serious environmental threats, including high levels of water and air pollution, and attendant health risks.

While many countries continue to grapple with high levels of poverty, low levels of literacy, gender inequality and gender-based violence, the biggest threat to the region is the steadily rising incidence of HIV/AIDS. Even in countries where the epidemic is localized or prevalent among specific population groups, there is a serious threat of its spilling over into the larger population and leading to major, generalized epidemics. Unless serious measures are taken to stem the epidemic in its nascence, the consequences could be devastating. Trafficking of women and youth is a serious related problem, especially in the Mekong subregion, where its connection to the sex industry has been one of the driving forces behind the epidemic.

There are a large number of adolescents, comprising a sizeable proportion of the total population most at risk of unwanted pregnancies, sexually transmitted infections and HIV/AIDS. At the same time, Asia is home to the majority of the world’s older people; above 8.8 per cent of the population was over 60 in 2000, the majority being women, and this figure is projected to reach 14.7 per cent by 2025. This emerging issue has major ramifications, as the developing countries of Asia and the Pacific still do not have systems of social protection in place, particularly old age security and health insurance.

Fortunately the region now has considerable institutional capacity and expertise (shared through South-to-South assistance) to undertake policy research on important population, poverty and development policy and programmatic linkages.

Despite all of the progress that has been made, in most countries of the region there are still significant unmet needs in the areas of family planning, reproductive health and especially AIDS prevention, treatment and advocacy. These unmet needs must be addressed if population growth rates are to be slowed and the ICPD and Millennium Goals are to be achieved by 2015.

Back to top