Mozambique: The Youth Dividend - 2019 Annual Report

The world commemorated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the ICPD in November 2019 in Nairobi, where governments and civil society organizations, including from Mozambique, made commitments to accelerate the implementation of the ICPD goals in their own countries and organizations. Two of the major themes of the Nairobi Summit on ICPD25 were the challenges of securing the rewards of a “demographic dividend” by investing in youthful populations and of the need to respond to the rising number of humanitarian crises in the world. Both of these themes had special resonance for Mozambique, a country poised to enter a period when it can benefit from the demographic dividend and a country that suffered cataclysmic humanitarian crises when it was hit by two cyclones in March and April 2019. The concept of a demographic dividend and realizing its potential are key to the sustainable development of Mozambique. The dividend occurs when the country’s productive population in their prime working years outnumbers the dependent populations below age 18 and above age 65. In the case of Mozambique, this demographic transition is being driven by a falling fertility rate, declining infant mortality, and increasing life expectancy. All of these favorable trends have been supported by UNFPA with the net result that the country will soon have a youth population “bulge” poised to propel the country forward.