President Md. Sahabuddin has called on all concerned to transform the country’s population into productive human resources by ensuring quality education, modern healthcare, skills development, employment and good governance.
He said: “A quality and planned population is a country’s chief asset and strength. It is the foundation of development and the key to prosperity. On the other hand, an unplanned and unskilled population is a major challenge for a country.”
He made the remarks as chief guest at an event marking World Population Day 2026 at the Osmani Memorial Auditorium in the capital on Sunday afternoon.
The president said: “A nation’s true strength does not depend on the size of its population, but on the education, health, skills, employment and productivity of its people.” He said an unskilled and unemployed population put extra pressure on education, healthcare, housing, the labor market, the environment, social security and public services, creating fresh challenges, and stressed giving the highest priority to ensuring a balanced population and improving its quality.
Recalling Bangladesh’s progress in population control, the president said: “The foundation stone of this journey was laid by the Shaheed president Ziaur Rahman. One of the points of his declared 19-point socio-economic emancipation program was ‘preventing the population explosion.’ In 1976, under his leadership, the National Population Council was formed and a ‘population policy’ was framed.” He said that later the former prime minister and Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) chairperson, Begum Khaleda Zia, gave special importance to family planning to achieve the maximum benefit of the demographic dividend, and that she had taken wide-ranging programs to increase women’s participation in education, which reduced child marriage and increased awareness, women’s employment opportunities and the take-up of family planning.
The president said Bangladesh was one of the world’s most densely populated countries, with very high population pressure relative to its limited land, natural resources and infrastructure. Alongside this, rapid urbanization, the adverse effects of climate change, environmental risks, limited investment and a lack of adequate employment were creating new challenges, he said. In this reality, population management was not merely a matter of family planning or the health sector but an inseparable part of economic development, good governance, social stability and building a sustainable future.
“About one-third of Bangladesh’s total population is young, and this vast working-age group is the country’s greatest potential, what in the language of economics is called the demographic dividend,” he said. Many countries such as Japan, South Korea, Singapore and China had used this opportunity properly to set unique examples of economic development in a short time, he said, adding that this opportunity was for a limited time and that today’s youth must be transformed into the skilled human resources of tomorrow; if that could not be done, this very potential could one day become a cause of unemployment, poverty, social unrest and economic pressure. Ensuring quality education, modern technological and technical skills, better healthcare and sustainable employment was therefore now an essential demand of the time, he said.
The president said he was pleased that this year’s World Population Day theme was deeply aligned with the hopes of youth and national priorities, and called for turning it into a practical plan of action. In this age of the fourth industrial revolution, he said, the world economy and labor market were changing rapidly, and young people had to be enriched in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, technical and vocational education, research and innovative skills, while also developing life skills such as problem-solving, creativity, communication, leadership, ethics and work culture. Effective coordination among educational institutions, industry and the labor market was needed to ensure education that enabled young people to meet the demands of both the domestic and global labor markets, he said.
Noting several important challenges, the president said the total population was still growing because, although the rate of population growth had fallen, a significant number of children were being born every year owing to the large base of the total population, and that the total fertility rate had remained steady at about 2.3 for the past decade and a half, which needed to be brought close to two to bring the population to a stable level in the long term.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report