Two or three, in theory. 1.7 in practice

"It’s very depressing,” she said about raising a child through that kind of schedule. "My child would miss me a lot but if I am spending time with her when I am home, she is okay."

Her daughter is now 14. Majidha, 37, wants another child. "If I was married I would have a child right now," she said. 

She thinks she could manage the cost. "Because the first time also I wasn’t prepared. Somehow you manage. So it seems without much of a plan also, it’s manageable." 

Majidha lives in the Greater Malé Region, home to more than 40 per cent of the population, a share that is projected to rise to 59 per cent by 2062. The fertility rate in the densely-packed capital has hovered around 1.6 since 2006, below both the national average of 1.7 children per woman, and the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman, the rate that is needed to keep the population size stable.

Both rates are well short of the two to three children most Maldivian women still name as their ideal. Last year, 36 per cent of women surveyed nationally said they want more children than they currently have. 

Focus group participants in a UNFPA study showed consensus on the specific set of obstacles: "high child-rearing costs, lack of childcare support, limited housing, delayed marriage due to education and careers, and reproductive health conditions, such as Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS)," according to the "Socio-economic drivers of low fertility in the Maldives" released in January.

"Negative birth experiences and loss of extended family support further suppress fertility confidence. Women emphasised the psychological toll of balancing work and family, especially without institutional backing. Cultural autonomy and lifestyle choices have also shifted perceptions on ideal family size," the report concluded.

In a 2025 survey of 479 Maldivian women aged 18 to 49 – a sample skewed toward the highly educated (77 per cent with university degrees) – the ideal number of children came in at 2.6 to 2.8. Two was named most often (37.6 per cent). Three was close behind (28.4 per cent). Among university-age youth surveyed separately in 2018–19, the ideal fell to 2.9 children compared to their own mothers’ average of 5.2. Younger women in the survey, those aged 18 to 25, were more likely than any other group to say they wanted no children at all (15.6 per cent). 

The women who took part in the survey were not describing a preference for smaller families so much as a set of conditions they could not meet. In the focus group, women converged on the cost of raising a child, the absence of childcare, limited housing, and marriage delayed by education and careers. Interviewed separately, fathers named urban congestion, financial stress and late marriage. 

By the 2022 census, 79 per cent of Maldivian men were in the labour force. The employment rate for women stood at 48 per cent. But among 15 to 24-year-olds in Malé, young women and men are almost equally likely to be in work or education: 15.8 per cent of women in that age group are in neither, compared to 16.2 per cent of men. Childbirth is when the gender employment gap opens. 

Majdha has lived on the inside of that gap for over a decade, cycling between jobs that do not hold her place. 

"I’ve worked in both," she said, of permanent and temporary positions. "I was working somewhere for a bit, again I was applying for jobs and moving from one to another. You do get maternity leave [in temporary position] but it is very likely that you might get fired. Depends on the place really. Even if it's permanent there are some offices that give you only three months as maternity leave." 

Nationally, 80 per cent of surveyed women hold temporary jobs that carry no maternity protection at all. The statutory minimum for those who do qualify is 60 days. Six months applies only in the public sector, a policy introduced in 2019 that never applied to private employers. Outside of the civil service, paternity leave for the father is three days. It is one month if they work for the government.

The childcare that would let Majidha work through a second pregnancy is not simple to arrange either. 

"If it's in the first stage, if it's a baby, then you would really need to stay home. You will have to quit work and stay home," she said. “When they're older, you can opt for a day care I guess or put your child at a relative's house when you go to work."

Paid daycare is an option but not an easy one. "It will be very very difficult. It would require me to work," she said.

A formal facility would cost MVR6,000 (US$389) a month per child, she estimated. If she did have a second child, Majidha's support network would be family, mother and in-laws. And maybe her future husband. 

Rishma* is 41. She has been married for 12 years. She has a permanent position in the corporate and financial sector. Her two children are aged four and eight. Rishma, her husband and both kids sleep in one room of her parents' house. 

"We're one big family living in one house. For rent. We rented out our house to build it up and we're living here,” Rishma said. 

She doesn't want a third child. 

“Two is more than enough for me. For two reasons, one is financial reasons. Two is ideal and in my case I got one of each...I'm aged now, since I'm 40+ now. Even when I first had a kid, it was after I turned 30. So because of that too,” she said. 

“Matters involving kids are very expensive...specially during periods like the start of the academic year, the costs are really high,” she added. 

Asked whether she could afford another child, Rishma acknowledged privileges that most people do not have. 

"Right now, in my situation, I can afford I think. But in the future I don't know. Specially people in government jobs, they barely can afford. I genuinely wonder how they manage with kids, no matter how much they want kids," she said. 

In the survey, lack of space (55.5 per cent) outranked finances (10.2 per cent) as the leading reason women give for not having more children. Rishma, whose two children live in her room, agreed. 

"We have to live in Malé in this congestion... Space is very important for kids... if you have that space at home, even the kids will be more comfortable,” she said. Without it, children end up on screens instead: “Mostly it will connect to things like increased use of phones or tablets if there is no space to play at home."

Renting on her own income isn't an option for Rishma. "We can't have that because if we go for rent, I will have to bring them everyday to my mom when I go to work,” she said. 

Her maternity leave was also a challenge both times. “Because I work at a private institution. We get two months, like, I get only 60 days. But in government, I think you can get six months...Both times I had C-sections. That physically heals within two months but mentally I was not fit at all. I had to struggle a lot to make it to feeding times and all,” she recalled.

Both women depend on the same fallback: a mother. Her own mother cares for Rishma’s children while she works. It is the arrangement her whole extended household is structured around, six adults sharing rent partly so grandmother and grandchildren stay under one roof. 

UNFPA's focus groups found that the loss of extended family support, alongside negative birth experiences, was among the factors that most reduced women's willingness to have another child. Households across the Maldives have been shifting from extended to nuclear for a generation. Malé's housing crisis has only accelerated it. 

"When I had my children, my mom actually took care of the children so that enabled me to come and work. I am here today because my family supported me," Shadiya Ibrahim, head of the UNFPA office in Malé, said. "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."

Majdha described what fills the gap: her mother, a friend’s house, a relative’s, whatever works at the time. What that shift costs even inside a large household shows up in how Rishma recounted her own days. 

"I’m not able to spend my own time because my children are very attached to me, they’re very demanding," she said. 

"That guilt is there when I'm at work, that someone else is doing everything for them, so I feel like it is my responsibility to give them time as soon as I finish work... I try to give more than even 110 percent to my children." 

She works about 10 hours a day and estimates about three uninterrupted hours with her children before bedtime. She said it’s the reason a third child is practically, not just financially, out of reach. 

"If I’m working it will be really hard to give time to a third child, even mentally I won’t be prepared," she said. "I also want to study further but I can't give that time to study even... I don't get my own time to do anything to develop myself."

In the 2018-19 survey of Maldivian university students, respondents estimated their mothers did around 47 hours of housework a week. Their fathers did 21. The same students overwhelmingly (93 per cent) endorsed shared domestic work in principle while many still held that men should be the main earners. 

Ainy* is 33, single, and unsure, not decided against children, but not planning around them either. 

"Maybe some day," she said. 

"Right now, it's a no because I don't have the financial means also and it is very much dependent on my partner. My partner's capabilities to be a good father is a very big criteria for me...not just as a babysitter, just as an equal caretaker."

Her constraint is a standard she hasn’t yet seen met coupled with an inadequate salary.

“Even later, maybe. But right now, I am unmarried and my current salary is not very reflective of this economy. Like, it's hard to even support one person on this salary,” she said. 

If she did have a child, the plan she describes isn’t one her income currently allows.

"Ideally I would like at least the first three years of my kid, I would really like to be a stay-at-home mom," she said. 

Ainy already carries care responsibilities of her own, for her father and a younger sister.

"I feel very directly obliged as she's the only younger sister so I have taken on that role on my own," she said.  

Asked what fills the space where children might otherwise be, she described the same instinct redirected rather than an alternative. "I think I would be more open to travelling, but then I also want the presence of kids...I would also like to be around kids," she said. 

Her partner isn't the only thing that stands between her and a different answer.

"There's not much of a guarantee even if you're married, the space for the couple to live on their own...at this point the only way I can start a life with somebody is by going for rent. And that itself is a very big pressure and a responsibility," she explained. 

"If our salary band and everything remains like this and if the inflation rate keeps going higher, I think I will be more inhibited...If those things are even better, I think it would be easier for me to even start thinking of these things even if I'm not materialising it."

None of the three women described a single missing policy so much as a stack of small ones. UNFPA's recommendations include expanded and affordable childcare infrastructure, standardised maternity and paternity leave across public and private sectors, and improved housing access for families with children in Greater Malé. 

Two of the three women are stopped at the same door. Majdha will not have a second child unless she marries; Ainy's only route to living with a partner is renting, which is the pressure that makes her hesitate. Three-quarters of Maldivian women aged 15 to 24 have never married, a share that rises to 81 per cent in Malé.

Shadiya from the UNFPA noted that the constraint young people face is not only material. "The problem now is young people don't have that conducive environment to start a family, or have a long relationship," she said. "In Maldives, you have to have a marriage if you are to start a family." The cost of supporting a household on one income was itself now a reason people were not marrying and more Maldivian women would remain single in the years ahead, she said.

UNFPA is working with the government on a national integrated care policy, the first framework covering childcare, elderly care and the unpaid work that currently falls to women. The policy will come as the country's population begins ageing, and as more people keep moving to the overcrowded, interconnected islands of Greater Malé.

Government policies are unlikely to push up the number of children Maldivian women have. The Statistics Bureau's population projections assumes that no scenario will bring the fertility rate of 1.7 back to replacement level. The question the three women's account raise is whether people can have the families they say they want regardless of the rate. 

"You cannot say, okay, country is targeting this fertility because it shouldn't be like that. The power must be given to the women," said Shadiya. "If a woman chooses, or if the woman has that desire to have five children, go ahead, and it is the country who would have to facilitate that. And if a woman wants one child, go ahead, but enable that person to live like that."