A number of countries, such as Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Jordan, and Turkey, have adopted explicit policies to lower fertility and have implemented national information and education campaigns to encourage smaller families.PACE (Policy, Advocacy, and Communication Enhanced)The Cairo Programme of Action calls on governmental and nongovernmental organizations and international development agencies to increase their support for and investments in reproductive health, girls’ education, and raising the status of women (see Thanks are due to Ismail Sirageldin and Tom Merrick who reviewed the draft and offered useful comments. In fact, many people from outside of the region are surprised to learn of the size of the populations of countries such as Nigeria (187 million), Ethiopia (102 million) or Congo (80 million). There are more people in the Middle East than in the U.S. and Canada combined, 342,704,563. If jobs are not created in sufficient numbers to absorb those joining the labor market, the resulting rise in unemployment could have a considerable political impact. Note that these figures all relate to population of working age, not to actual workers. Population Trends and Challenges in the Middle East and North Africa* Palestine includes the Arab populations of the West Bank and Gaza.The 1994 Cairo conference was a landmark in the series of UN population conference because it emphasized individual needs and well-being beyond family planning-including the need for comprehensive reproductive health care and improvements in the status of women.
The region's population grew from 92 million to 349 million, a 3.8 fold increase, or 2.7 percent a year. Central to both challenges will be how women's social role evolves, especially women's employment opportunities outside the home. In other words, it is possible that as they increasingly graduate from high school and university, more and more Middle East women will seek to work outside the home.
From 2000 to 2050, the Middle East's population is estimated to increase by 329 million people (from 349 million to 678 million), actually more than the 258 million increase in population from 1950 to 2000. Then, as the numbers of elderly begin to increase, the dependency ratio will rise again, reaching 0.66 in 2050 (forecasting out much further than that becomes quite speculative). Yet by 2050, the absolute size of the annual increase in the population is expected to slow to a crawl.Copyright 2020 The Washington Institute - printed with permission
Most support the provision of family planning information and services, directly or indirectly, as part of their primary health care services. In addition, the region’s scarce water resources need to be managed in the face of growing demand.ICPD set the following quantifiable goals for 2015:On the other hand, there were countries such as Algeria that did not see a need for organized family planning programs as part of their national development plans. From 2000 to 2050, the proportions in the population growth will likely reverse: one-third will be elderly and one-twentieth will be children. However, to date, women's labor force participation has lagged behind trends in much of the rest of the world. What happens to women's employment status will do much to influence how the region develops. Three of the world’s major religions originated in the region — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Only under the most optimistic scenarios about high oil prices would the oil-rich countries have sufficient resources to create government jobs for the young people looking for their first positions, and it would be even more optimistic to think that the spill-over from the oil-rich countries to other Middle Eastern states would provide the governments in those countries the resources they would need to fund a similar expansion in public employment.Ideas. Policymakers and the general public are only slow realizing that the Middle East's long population boom is coming to an end. All Rights Reserved.