Friday, July 11 is the 2025 commemoration of the World Population Day, an annual event, observed to raise awareness on global population issues such as family planning, gender equality, poverty, maternal health as well as human rights; it encourages worldwide attention to population issues, aiming to promote sustainable development and well-being.
The event, established by the Governing Council of the United Nations Development Programme in 1989, was inspired by the public interest in Five Billion Day on July 11, 1987, when the global population reached five billion. This day encourages worldwide attention to population issues, aiming to promote sustainable development and well-being.
It raises awareness to highlight population-related issues and their impact on development, advocates for access to family planning services to improve maternal and child health, emphasize the importance of gender equality in achieving sustainable development and these goals have been linked to the Sustainable Development Goals particularly: SDG 3: Good Health and Well-being: Promoting access to health services for all and SDG 5: Gender Equality: Supporting initiatives that ensure equal opportunities for women and girls.
It is a day that unites advocates, leaders and organizations to address population challenges and serves as a platform for dialogue and action, aiming to create a future where everyone can access reproductive health services and enjoy their rights.
And as the world observes World Population Day 2025, the focus has not deviated from the goal of a world where every person has access to health services, rights are upheld and sustainable development is achieved.
This year, the focus is on young families with the theme, “Empowering young people to create the families they want in a fair and hopeful world.”
Global fertility rates are falling, prompting warnings about “population collapse.” But the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA)’s State of World Population report shows the real issue is a lack of reproductive agency which has made many people, especially youths, unable to have the children they want.
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World Population Day 2025 will highlight this challenge, focusing on the largest-ever generation of young people. The theme calls for ensuring youth have the rights, tools, and opportunities to shape their futures.
According to a UNFPA-YouGov survey of over 14,000 people in 14 countries, young people are already driving change, but face major obstacles: economic insecurity, gender inequality, limited healthcare and education, climate disruption, and conflict. The survey found that most wanted more children but were prevented by social, economic or health barriers.
It is advocated that to respond to global population trends effectively, leaders must prioritize young people’s needs and voices. They need more than services; they need hope, stability and a future worth planning for.
A youth activist told UNFPA, “Young people are not just thinking about their future children, they are thinking about the world those children will inherit.” Supporting their rights is key to sustainable development, peace, and human dignity.
The growth of population globally has followed a trend that has raised concerns in many quarters; it took hundreds of thousands of years for the world population to grow to 1 billion – then in just another 200 years or so, it grew sevenfold. In 2011, the global population reached the 7 billion mark, it stands at almost 7.9 billion in 2021, and it’s expected to grow to around 8.5 billion in 2030, 9.7 billion in 2050, and 10.9 billion in 2100.
This dramatic growth has been driven largely by increasing numbers of people surviving to reproductive age, and has been accompanied by major changes in fertility rates, increasing urbanization and accelerating migration. These trends will have far-reaching implications for generations to come.
The recent past has seen enormous changes in fertility rates and life expectancy. In the early 1970s, women had on average 4.5 children each; by 2015, total fertility for the world had fallen to below 2.5 children per woman. Meanwhile, average global life spans have risen, from 64.6 years in the early 1990s to 72.6 years in 2019.
Also, the world is seeing high levels of urbanization and accelerating migration. 2007 was the first year in which more people lived in urban areas than in rural areas, and by 2050 about 66 per cent of the world population according to estimation, will be living in cities.
These megatrends have far-reaching implications. They affect economic development, employment, income distribution, poverty and social protections. They also affect efforts to ensure universal access to health care, education, housing, sanitation, water, food and energy. To more sustainably address the needs of individuals, policymakers must understand how many people are living on the planet, where they are, how old they are, and how many people will come after them. And this underscores the commemoration of the World Population Day.
