The call came during the launch of its annual flagship report ‘State of World Population 2014’ on Tuesday at its Asia-Pacific regional headquarter in Bangkok as elsewhere in the world including Bangladesh.
This year the report focused on 1.8 billion young people aged between 10 years and 24 years across the world, calling it ‘The Power of 1.8 billion’.
The report is relevant to Bangladesh as the country is witnessing a demographic change with low fertility and mortality rates.
UNFPA says young people of this age group comprise 30 percent of the total population of Bangladesh, the world’s eighth most populous country.
It gives ‘a window of opportunity’ for any developing economy to flourish if properly utilised.
But it warned that the opportunity would not come “automatically”.
A country has to invest for that and its ‘now’ as the young people is becoming older by the day.
“A young, working-age population can propel economies forward if properly used,” according to the report.
And for that the report suggested economic management, good governance and right policies without which countries cannot be successful to reap the benefit of demographic changes.
A group of UNFPA officials of the regional office presented the report to the visiting journalists of the Asia-Pacific region as part of its global launch.
The report presented East Asian countries as example.
In the 1950s and 1960s, several East Asian economies invested “heavily in young people’s capabilities and in expanding their access to voluntary family planning, enabling individuals to start families later and have fewer children”.
The result was “unprecedented” economic growth like what happened in South Korea that saw per capital GDP grow about 2,200 percent between 1950 and 2008.
The report underscored the need of quality education and access to employment for the young people in this regard.