Yemen: At the 'Tipping Point'

Yemen is marked by a rapidly growing population and very young age structure. In 2005, the country was home to 21 million people, nearly three times its 1980 population of 8.4 million. Driven by a very high fertility rate of six children per woman, Yemen’s population is currently growing at three percent annually. With 75 percent of its population under the age of 30 and 46 percent under 15, Yemen has the most youthful age structure in the world external pageoutside sub-Saharan Africa.call_made

Yemen’s ongoing population growth is occurring in a context that is highly challenging to development. Per capita income is less than $600 a year, more than 40 percent of the population lives in poverty, and by some external pageestimatescall_made, more than one-third of adults are unemployed. Environmental problems compound the country’s demographic challenges: Yemen is mostly desert, with arable land totaling less than three percent of its area and one of the lowest levels of per capita water availability in the world.

The influence of population on a state’s security, democracy and development is significant and quantifiable. Countries with a very young age structure, like Yemen, are more likely to have experienced outbreaks of civil conflict and incidences of undemocratic rule from the 1970s through the current decade. Although demographic factors alone are unlikely to directly cause conflict or autocracy, countries with very young age structures face greater difficulties in improving the welfare of their people and solving political and economic problems.

Scholars and other experts are expressing growing concern that Yemen’s stability has reached a “tipping point” in recent years, and demographic issues are widely cited as a contributing factor to the country’s fragility. “Inadequate economic development and a concomitant decline in living standards are causing civil unrest, fueling regional rebellion, and slowly dragging the country toward collapse,” according to external pageIntissar Fakircall_made of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Much of the country is under tribal rule and out of the reach of the government, whose limited capacity to enforce laws has turned Yemen into a refuge for extremists. Terrorism based in or near Yemen in the past decade has ranged from the bombing of the USS Cole and ongoing strikes by Somali pirates along the coast to ambushes of foreign tourists and suicide attacks against the US embassy.

Although Yemen has held a series of elections since its first direct presidential election in 1999, President Ali Abdallah Saleh has faced few major challenges to his 30-year hold on power. While operating as a technical democracy, the government maintains a strong centralist orientation, carefully restricting opposition to a finite and regulated degree of political space. The government’s reach is also limited by the strength of tribal authorities, “a state within a state” whose long-standing preference to maintain their autonomy is reinforced by the perception of a weak and corrupt government. Corruption and mismanagement has been widespread at all levels of government; on the economic front, the oil resources on which the government has relied are declining, while employment prospects in the manufacturing and agricultural sectors are limited.

Yemen's age structure, 1975

Yemen's age structure, 2005

Yemen's projected age structure, 2025

Yemen’s high fertility is maintained by gender norms that place high value on women’s reproduction and restrict their mobility outside the home. Women are expected to marry and commence childbearing at an early age. Use of family planning in Yemen is low, with just over 13 percent of married women reporting current use of a modern contraceptive method. Fifty-one percent of married women are estimated to have an unmet need for family planning - the external pagehighest levelcall_made, by far, in the world.

Although Yemen is a conservative society, cultural mores are often quite separate from religious beliefs. Many scholars agree that Islamic texts allow the use of family planning, which has been supported by governments and widely adopted in many Muslim countries, among them Morocco, Indonesia, Tunisia and Turkey. However, in Yemen, a historic lack of strong government support for family planning has allowed misinformation to flourish, with many women believing that Islam prohibits contraceptive use.

The challenges that Yemen’s very young age structure poses to the country’s political stability, economic development, and the well-being of its people are recognized by the country’s civil society, media and donors. In a 2006 assessment of the country’s progress toward meeting the Millennium Development Goals, the United Nations external pagenotedcall_made that “high population growth remains an underlying cause of many of the problems Yemen faces,” adding that “less than full attention to the population dynamics in the country, and in particular, efforts to increase birth spacing and decrease the total fertility rate…will undermine socio-economic development efforts.”

The impediments to Yemen’s development extend far beyond the population sector. However, issues such as environmental resource shortages, political unrest and poverty are intertwined with and compounded by the country’s rapidly growing population. The situation is especially acute for young people, who comprise a growing share of the population and are especially hard-hit by high unemployment rates. Still, Yemen’s youth have greater opportunities for health and education than older generations, and they also demonstrate more equitable views on gender roles. The changing attitudes among young people, which reflect stronger beliefs in gender equity, should be reinforced in both formal education and informal community settings. In addition, this growing and vital generation of young people must be provided with greater educational and training opportunities.

Although the benefits of achieving a more balanced age structure in Yemen will be reflected at the societal and national levels, the steps needed to make such progress must begin by focusing on individual women and families. The cost of providing family planning services to meet needs currently unmet in Yemen has been estimated at $14.3 million. Such an investment would have external pagefar-reaching social dividendscall_made and would pay for itself more than 30 times over. Fulfilling unmet need for family planning could prevent 5,500 maternal deaths and nearly 400,000 child deaths in less than a decade.