The recent increase in Bangladesh’s total fertility rate has triggered a familiar alarm. The 2025 Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey estimated that women now have, on average, 2.4 children, up from 2.3 in 2019. The numerical increase is small, but the conditions surrounding it may carry serious consequences. Contraceptive use has declined while national supply disruptions weakened access to family-planning services. Adolescent births have increased, and child marriage remains widespread. These failures demand an urgent response. Yet the debate becomes misleading when it assumes Bangladesh faces only one demographic problem, too many births.
In reality, the country must manage two demographic clocks at the same time. The first is immediate. Women and girls are becoming pregnant because contraception is unavailable, reproductive- health information is inadequate, or marriage occurs before they can exercise meaningful choice. The second moves more slowly. Bangladesh’s population is ageing, family sizes are shrinking over the long term, and the future workforce will eventually have to support a much larger elderly population. These are not competing concerns. Restoring voluntary family planning today while building an ageing society’s institutions for tomorrow has become a must for Bangladesh.
According to the United Nations in Bangladesh, people aged 60 and above accounted for 9.29 percent of the population in 2022, or roughly 15 million people, and their number could reach 36 million by 2050. The World Bank has warned that by 2050 about one in five Bangladeshis may be 60 or older. Fertility decline has given Bangladesh a large working-age population relative to its dependants. This is the demographic dividend celebrated in successive development plans. That dividend, however, is temporary. Today’s workers will become tomorrow’s elderly citizens. At the same time, the smaller generations born after decades of falling fertility will enter the labour market. The number of births may continue to decline even if the fertility rate stabilises, because there will eventually be fewer women of childbearing age. Bangladesh will then have fewer workers relative to retirees, fewer adult children sharing the care of ageing parents, and a narrower tax base from which to finance healthcare and social protection. Over time, the country’s demographic structure may begin to resemble a narrowing funnel, with fewer workers supporting a growing elderly population. So, the immediate clock is already ringing loudly along with a second challenge.
Bangladesh is poorly prepared for this transition. The National Policy on Older Persons was adopted in 2013, alongside measures such as the Maintenance of Parents Act, the Old Age Allowance and, later, the Universal Pension Scheme. Together, these measures recognise the rights of older people, but their implementation remains fragmented and uneven. The United Nations has acknowledged that many older people remain outside existing social-security programmes in Bangladesh. The Old Age Allowance is not universal and its benefit remains too small to provide meaningful protection against food, housing, medicine and transport costs. The contributory Universal Pension Scheme is an important reform, but it also shows the limits of relying mainly on individual contributions where nearly 85 percent of workers are in the informal economy. As of April 30, 2026, only 377,545 people had registered under its four schemes, a small fraction of the population that require protection. Healthcare policy is similarly underprepared. Older people often live with several chronic conditions requiring continuous treatment over occasional hospital visits. Yet high costs, weak access to medicines and transport, shortages of trained providers and age discrimination contributes as major barriers. Bangladesh still lacks a nationwide system connecting primary care, rehabilitation, geriatric care, palliative care, home-based assistance and regulated long-term care. This gap is concealed by the assumption that families will continue caring for older relatives. The Maintenance of Parents Act reinforces family responsibility replacing its duty to develop professional and affordable care services. It treats care largely as a private
household duty. In practice, that duty falls disproportionately on daughters and daughters-in-law that further perpetuates gender inequality. Urbanisation, migration and smaller families have made traditional care arrangements increasingly fragile.
Bangladesh therefore needs a two-horizon demographic policy. It needs a policy that defends reproductive freedom now and guarantees dignity in old age. Family-planning services must be reliable, accessible and protected from political neglect. At the same time, pensions, healthcare and care systems must be rebuilt for a population that is living longer and relying on smaller families. The state has no right to dictate how many children people should have. Its duty is to ensure that women can choose motherhood freely and that older citizens are not abandoned when work, health or family support begins to fail. A humane demographic policy must protect people across the full course of life.
Bangladesh must learn to look at both ends of life at once and it still has time to act. Today, women and girls are being failed by weak family-planning services and limited reproductive choice. Tomorrow, millions of older people may find that the country has not built the care, security and dignity they need. The answer is not to ask families for fewer children now and more later. It is to protect choice in youth and dignity in old age. One clock is already ticking in the lives of our women and girls. The other is moving quietly through every ageing household. Bangladesh must prepare for births today and ageing tomorrow.
Sabilla Suhael is an intern at the Applied Democracy Lab, and an undergraduate student at the Department of Women and Gender Studies, University of Dhaka.
