Everyone is having fewer children. The Maldives is not special

But dheythere dhurukurun was aimed at keeping mothers alive, not halving the birth rate. 

"I don't know if your mom would have been alive if we didn't have this programme, and I don't know if I would have survived if we didn't have the programme," Shadiya Ibrahim, the UNFPA Maldives head of office, told the Maldives Independent. 

The fertility collapse, which was not the programme's target, is now seen as a looming national crisis.

In 2019, the total fertility rate (TFR) – defined as the average number of children a woman would have over her lifetime – declined to 1.8, below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman, the rate that is needed to keep the population size stable. The 2022 census measured a TFR of 1.7 children. 

Shadiya, who joined UNFPA in 1997, has worked on the country's population data since the era of high maternal mortality. A key factor behind the deaths then was "because people were becoming pregnant very closely, and that really was a big burden on a woman's body," she explained. The child spacing programme was intended to "allow women to survive," she added. "And I think this programme really worked."

Five women died due to complications from pregnancy and childbirth last year, the vital statistics report for 2025 released earlier this month showed. The Maldives now has one of the lowest maternal, neonatal and under-five mortality rates in South Asia.

"The total fertility went down quite fast because all other development indicators also changed very rapidly," Shadiya noted. "We've had huge success in terms of girls' education. Now we've reached parity a few years ago, and now even women do better in education [...] So with everything else, we had a very rapid sort of development trajectory for the people. So it's a good achievement. We should celebrate those achievements. But now, what we have to do is to prepare for what comes next."

In October, the Maldives Bureau of Statistics published a population projection built on the assumption that fertility stays below replacement level. Under the bureau's central scenario, the Maldivian population is projected to peak around 2050 and decline thereafter. 

Four years after fertility fell to 2.8 children per woman, the Maldivian government formalised the decline as a national target. The 2004 Population Policy set a goal of bringing fertility down to near-replacement level within 20 years. That goal "has been successfully achieved with the outcome of 1.7 TFR [Total Fertility Rate] in 2022," reads the UNFPA's "Socioeconomic Drivers of Low Fertility in Maldives" published in January 2026.

But Shadiya, who co-authored the report, doubted whether "the country has actually implemented anything to control or have a certain fertility rate, because I've not seen any programmes targeting a specific fertility rate."

The standard had never been a number, she suggested. "If you have children you have to give them the best to meet their full potential, education-wise, health-wise, economic-wise. And if you can't because of too many children, then that's too many," she said. "But what's happening is inequalities. There may be a few families who have surplus, but the majority now can't even afford to have one child."

The 2004 policy has not been replaced with a new one. The Statistics Bureau noted that it had to build 40 years of national forecasting on fertility assumptions "in the absence of" any government guidance.

The bureau was previously caught out by the speed of the decline. Its 2019 population projection assumed a TFR of 1.7 would not be reached until after 2054. It was recorded decades early in the 2022 census.

The Maldives is not an outlier. East Asia and the Pacific fell below replacement in 1995 and has kept falling since, averaging a TFR of 1.5 by 2021. In South Asia, only Bhutan sits lower than the Maldives, at 1.4, while Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Sri Lanka are all around 2.0. 

"Many, many countries are going through this transition, and many countries are around the same level, 1.9 to 1.5 during this time," Shadiya observed.

The blame for the collapse has fallen on familiar local villains: the divorce rate and the cost of housing in Malé. But neither explanation holds up particularly well.

The fertility collapse in the 1990s happened before Malé's housing crisis reached its current severity. It is a real constraint on Maldivian family size at present, but it is not the story of how the Maldives got here.

The high divorce rate is often cited as a driver of low fertility. But neither the UNFPA nor the Statistics Bureau report offered evidence for a direct link.

For Shadiya, divorce is less a separate cause and more a symptom of the same root problem: women's economic dependency. "Divorce in the context of Maldives is because a lot of women are not in the labour force, so they have to depend on income from somebody else," she said.

"So that is why they find partners, and in the context of Maldives, people generally consider men as the breadwinners [...] It requires both parents to work full time to meet the needs of a family, and then if you only have a woman looking after the high cost, you can imagine, you can do the arithmetic yourselves."

In UNFPA's 2025 survey of Maldivian women, lack of living space was the single most common reason (55.5 per cent) given for not having more children, well ahead of financial difficulty (10.2 per cent) or health problems (19.6 per cent). 

Shadiya connected it to a deeper shift in who actually raises children. 

"When I had my children, my mom actually took care of the children. So that enabled me to come and work [...] Right now we are moving from extended to nuclear family, and that also comes with a cost, because you have to pay for even a single minute of child care," she said.

"It takes a village to raise children and I think that is true."

That shift could also explain the gap between stated ideal family size of around 2.6 to 2.9 children, according to both the youth and women's surveys, and the actual rate of 1.7. 

"A lot of women want to have two children, and that's okay. You can sustain the population," Shadiya said. 

The UNFPA report identified drivers associated with fertility transitions globally: rising female education, later marriage, urbanisation and women's entry into paid work. 

"The Maldivian case aligns with these broader trends, but also exhibits distinctive local considerations such as religious norms, spatial limitations in Greater Malé and institutional gaps in family support services such as lack of unified parental leave (currently a parental leave of six months is available only for the public sector employees, but not for private sector employees)," it stated.

In the Maldives, age at first marriage rose from 19.5 in 2000 to 22.7 in 2022; the share of never-married women aged 15 to 24 rose from 66 to 76 per cent over the same period. In one counter-intuitive finding, contraceptive prevalence fell from 42 per cent of women in 1999 to 19 per cent in 2021, even as the birth rate kept falling.

Of the 1,399 deaths registered in the Maldives last year, 858 – 61 per cent – were people aged 65 or over, who make up five per cent of the Maldivian population.

Under the Statistics Bureau's estimate, which assumes fertility settles at 1.5, the resident population – Maldivians and foreign residents combined – is projected to grow from 547,651 in 2022 to 678,024 in 2062, while the resident Maldivian population alone grows from 381,436 to 414,679 over the same period. 

The Maldivian population is projected to peak at around 428,000 in 2050 before declining. The overall resident population is projected to register its first-ever year of negative growth in 2053.

But there will be more Maldivians alive in 2062 than there are today. The population will not disappear. It will just get older.

By the bureau's thresholds, the Maldives becomes an "ageing" population between 2026 and 2044 (when the over-65 share passes seven per cent), an "aged" population between 2045 and 2051, and a "super-aged" population from 2052 onward. This means about 29 per cent of Maldivians will be 65 or older by 2062. The old-age dependency ratio, elderly people per 100 working-age Maldivians, rises from eight in 2022 to 50 in 2062. The median age of the Maldivian population rises from 30 to 48 over the same period.

The working-age resident Maldivian population is projected to peak in 2042, 16 years from now, at just over 300,000, before beginning a long decline.

The bureau's model treats the foreign population as a rotating workforce. At every point in the 40-year projection, children and people over 65 together make up under two per cent of resident foreigners. The bureau explicitly assumes the foreign population is "replenished each year" rather than ageing in place. Within that structure, foreigners are projected to rise from 30 per cent of the resident population in 2022 to 39 per cent in 2062.

The bureau modelled three long-run fertility scenarios for the Maldives: 1.3, 1.5 and 1.7 children per woman. It chose these from the international distribution of countries that have fallen below a TFR of 1.9. None of the three returns to replacement level. 

The analysis found that "most countries do not return to higher fertility levels once they fall below 1.9," usually stabilising at or below 1.5.  

"No country has been successful in reversing total fertility," said Shadiya. 

"I think the best investment is to enable women to thrive, to enable women to have both family and also work. That's the best investment you can have. You cannot say, 'okay, the country is targeting this fertility because it shouldn't be like that.' The power must be given to the women." 

A compounding, mechanical problem beneath the fertility rate is the shrinking number of women available to have children. Maldivian women of reproductive age (15–49) are projected to fall from 104,439 in 2022 to 78,538 in 2062 (from 56 per cent of Maldivian women to 38 per cent).

Shadiya rejected the conclusion some might draw from this. 

"Right now, out of the women, we have two people in the reproductive age group, and very soon that is going to be one," she said.  "That number soon is going to become one out of three. So that is why we need women. We cannot ask women to stay home and have babies. You can't do that. You can't decide for the women." 

The UNFPA study's structural recommendations included a national population policy, better housing for families in Greater Malé, standardised maternity and paternity leave across the public and private sectors, expanded and subsidised childcare, and greater male involvement in domestic work. Although the study's cited data put primary infertility at two per cent of women, it also proposed subsidised fertility treatment, routine screening and affordable IVF. 

The UNFPA called for public campaigns to idealise healthy families and align reproductive values with Islamic principles of family responsibility. The abstract described the aim as countering declining fertility trends. It listed media campaigns on normalising big families among the measures.

But UNFPA's State of World Population 2025, which the Maldives report’s preface cites, criticised measures to persuade women and young people to have more children, telling policymakers and media to avoid alarmism. 

Shadiya agreed that this could pose a risk to women. "Yes, there is [a risk], because I'm sure you hear a lot now – to provide incentives to give birth," she said. 

"So that is a risk on women's bodies. Because the more children they have, the women will be constantly dealing with pregnancy-related issues. If that is what they want, it's fine. But if that's not what they want, and if the husband or the community or the social pressure is like, oh, so few, just one child – it's pressure. And if you start giving incentives, like, okay, MVR2,000 [US$130] will be provided if they have another child, that's also pressure, right?"

She was specific in drawing the line between removing a barrier and applying pressure: "The moment it is sort of coerced – when it reaches coercion, I think it's pressure. For example, if your intention is not to have this new life, if that is the case, it's okay. But if you're having that to get that MVR5,000 from the government, then it's not okay."

The problem was not the absence of women in government, she suggested.

"We don't only need people in seats. We need agenda setting, and that's not happening no matter how many women are put in places," she said. "Have you heard any woman parliamentarian in the Majlis talking about gender issues? Just putting someone there doesn't work. That is the change that is needed. Then women will have children." 

Shadiya's office is now working with the government on a national integrated care policy, the first attempt at a framework covering childcare, elderly care and the unpaid work that currently falls to women.

She described the care economy as an island. "Say, on an island where there is a woman, a 30-year-old with a child, but unable to go to the next-door resort because she would have to take care of the children," she said. "If that island has a facility where, say, an older person, maybe 65 and retired and in good health, that person minds this child. Not at an individual level – an organised structure set up on that island."

Asked what a future with fewer barriers might look like, she said: "It's nothing that has to be pushed. I'm sure they will want to have children, because it's a natural thing. Now they don't feel it because they have other things to worry about."