On World Population Day 2026, under the theme “Realizing the hopes and aspirations of young people – today and for the future,” I welcome UNFPA’s landmark report, Lives, Choices and Futures: What Young People Want and What Shapes Their Decisions about Relationships and Parenthood, drawn from the Demographic Futures Survey of more than 108,000 young adults aged 18 to 39 across 73 countries, one of the most geographically diverse bodies of evidence on how young people envision their futures.

The findings speak clearly, with more than two-thirds of respondents wishing to marry or live with a partner and two children remaining the most desired family size across five of seven regions. In contrast, economic precarity, housing insecurity and constrained access to reproductive healthcare remain the most cited barriers to these aspirations, confirming that the defining demographic challenge of our era is the gap between reproductive aspiration and reproductive agency, the very gap the ICPD Programme of Action, on whose Nairobi Summit International Steering Committee I have been privileged to serve, seeks to close.

I congratulate the laureates of the forty-first United Nations Population Award, Professor Serigne Magueye Gueye of Senegal, honoured for decades of surgery restoring dignity to women living with obstetric fistula and for training surgeons across 45 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, and H.E. Mrs Angeline Ndayishimiye, First Lady of Burundi, honoured for the Fondation Bonne Action Umugiraneza and its polyclinic serving rural Gitega Province.

This day resonates personally through my role as a Mentor to Young Leaders within UNFPA’s Youth Programming and through our Wellbeing for Women Africa Youth Voices Initiative, elevating young advocates into the rooms where policy is made. Realising these aspirations now requires investment in housing, decent work and rights-based reproductive healthcare at a scale worthy of what young voices have told the world they want.

 

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