SRI LANKA Births also plummet in Sri Lanka: only 228,000 in 2024

Colombo joins the many countries in Asia fighting the demographic winter. Just fifteen years ago, more than 350,000 children were born per year. Emigration also accentuates the phenomenon. According to estimates, in 2041 one in four inhabitants of the country will be over 60 years old.

Colombo () – In Sri Lanka there were only 228,091 new births in 2024. A figure that demonstrates the worsening of the strong contraction, in a country that in the first decade of the 2000s still recorded a stable number of births above 350 thousand units. The news was made public by the director general of the Department of Population and Statistics, Anoja Seneviratne, when she intervened in a debate on the issue of demographic decline that was raised a few days ago in the country by Professor Deepal Perera, a pediatrician at the Lady Ridgeway Hospital in Sri Lanka. Lanka.

“The decline in the pediatric population is mainly due to the migration of many young people, a significant number of whom are reluctant to marry or choose not to have children due to the current economic crisis,” Perera said in an expert debate on the topic. “Charting the future of Sri Lanka.” He added that it is also necessary to protect the existing child population, as it is vulnerable to various communicable and non-communicable diseases, as well as psychological problems.

Sri Lanka’s total fertility rate, which was 5.3 children per woman in 1953, fell to just 1.97 in 2023, below the replacement level of 2.1 that demographers consider necessary to maintain a stable population. . According to projections by the “2022 Revision of World Population Prospects”, Sri Lanka’s current annual population growth rate of 0.35% will stop around 2035 and then begin to decline.

According to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the decline in fertility is related to another demographic change: the rapid aging of the population. It is expected that by 2041, one in four Sri Lankans will be over 60 years old.

Photo: Flickr / McCourtie/World Bank