Salient features of the Aged Population of Bangladesh

Sumaiya Abedin, Assistant Professor
Department of Population Science and Human Resource Development
University of Rajshahi, Bangladesh

Correspondence to:
E-mail: abedins_pops@yahoo.com

INTRODUCTION

In developing countries like Bangladesh, the issue of aging is yet to gain the desired momentum. In Bangladesh, the age structure of the population is changing because of declines in fertility and increases in life expectancy. Decreases in fertility rates and improvement in life expectancy have led to rapid increases in the number of older people in Bangladesh. Currently about 6% of the total population in Bangladesh are aged population. The figure may be small compared to many developing countries but due to the large size of the population, it represents approximately 7.3 million. Under the assumption of replacement level of fertility the elderly population will be nearly double by the year 2025 (Kabir, 2000). The present study aims at eliciting information on different characteristics which have a bearing on the social, economical and health condition of the elderly and these characteristics influence the socio-economic performance and health status which is the subject matter of analysis and identification of the issue of aging in Bangladesh. The present study eliciting information on the educational status, working status, health status, marital status, household status and religion of the elderly people is based on the census data.

Concept, process and perspectives of population aging

Population aging is a demographic process that occurs due to interplay between fertility and mortality in the human population. The interplay between birth and death, the two natural events, cause change in the age structure of the population and such change may affect not only the base of the population structure but also population of older age groups. The aging of population is a universal phenomenon; an inevitable result of declining fertility or birth and improved status of survival. Declining fertility reduces the proportion of the young in the population resulting in a larger proportion of the "aged". (Leete R. and Alam I., 1999)

Aging has become a focal point of emerging issues in the world's population in the present millennium. Not only are the elderly living longer, but also they are growing older in marked different ways from their predecessors. In recent years there has been an increasing interest in aging of the human population within developed and developing countries. The rapid and faster technological progress in medical sciences, control of fertility and mortality rates is resulting in increasing the life span.

Population aging is attributed to a decline in fertility, mortality and improved public health interventions. In 2000, the world wide population of persons aged =65 years is projected to increase by approximately 490 million to 973 million, increasing from 6.9% to 12% world wide, from 15.5% to 24.35% in Europe, from 12.6% to 20.3% in North America, from 5.5% to 11.6% in Latin America, from 6.0% to 12% in Asia and from 2.9% to 3.7% in Sub-Saharan Africa (Goulding, 2003).

Population ageing is increasingly becoming an issue of concern throughout the world, especially in countries like Bangladesh where the growth rate of the older population is taking place at a much faster pace. It is seen as a major development challenge, especially in settings where there is limited institutional, human and financial resource capacity to meet the basic needs of the growing number of older persons. Population aging in Bangladesh is viewed as a natural outcome of demographic transition from high fertility and mortality to low fertility and mortality. It represents the years of successful family planning and public health programs that have changed the population growth of the country (Strong, 1992). In Bangladesh, most of the elderly people are subject to fair old age. Their daily activities are regulated with tradition values, attitudes and behavioral imperatives that old age is a time for reflection on death and withdrawal from the world.

The aged or the elderly population
The literal meaning of the term "age" refers to the time during which a person or thing has lived or existed. Likewise "aging" denotes the process of growing old or developing qualities of the old. (McDonald, 1978). It is the attainment of approximately sixty years of age when a person is usually labeled as aged. Furthermore, it is the age when a person in Government service retires from their job. Again, most of the states have laid down sixty-five years as the minimum age, as the eligibility criteria for the old age pension while in a few states the age limit is 60+.
Ryder (1975) studied the fixing of an age boundary for the elderly. His suggestion of setting a lower boundary of old age on the basis of a fixed interval to death merits consideration, so that age defining the population will not be time dependent.
In the case of Bangladesh, like many developing countries, population aged 60 and over has been considered to be the aged or the elderly population or also older persons. The present study is carried out in consideration that the population of age 60 and over as older persons is the target population for analyzing aging of the population in the context of Bangladesh.

DATA SOURCE

Although a good number of surveys have been conducted in Bangladesh, at present the most complete and reliable source of information on aged population at country level and its geographic sub-divisions is the census based on house-to-house enumeration. The information presented in this study is secondary and used mainly the census data from the Bangladesh Population Census- 2001, published in July 2003. All these data were officially published by Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS), which is an agency of the Government of Bangladesh.

Salient features of the elderly population
In this study, we have tried to address the socio-economic and health status of the elderly people and discuss the strategic policy measures to be taken, that would be necessary to improve their well being.

Religious status
Table 1 represents variations between religious groups. It seems that most of the older persons are Muslim. No significant difference is observed by sex or residence. In Bangladesh, 87.7 percent of elderly are Muslim and the other 12.3 percent are different religious groups- Hindu, Buddhist, Christian or other. Among the elderly population 11.1 percent are Hindu.

Table 1: Distribution of older persons by religion

Marital status
Marital status and its differentials play a vital role in composition and structure of a population. Marriage is an event that generally marks the beginning of the potential period of childbearing. Marital status is an important consideration for the elderly because it influences the physical and mental stability of older persons. In Bangladesh, marriage is universal and in our study we found very few older male and females that are still never married. Widowhood is another important consideration with reference to the elderly. In this respect from Table 2 we found a large number of elderly women falling into this category. We found a large number of elderly are still in a marital union.

Table 2: Distribution of older persons by marital status

From Table 2, we can see 77.3 percent elderly are married and this event is more or less equal to both rural and urban areas (72.4% and 72.5% respectively). But there seems a difference between male and female elderly, which is 92.1 percent and 47.8 percent respectively. From the Table we see that 46.1 of elderly women are widows. But in case of elder males, very few elderly are widowers (3.7 percent). In our society, divorce or separated older persons are also very few in number being only 0.3 percent.

Household living status
Persons whether related or not, living together and taking food from the same kitchen, are considered as a household and household status is one of the important aspects of living arrangements of elderly persons. The status of aged population in households largely depends on the type of households they live in and type of families they belong to and also on the interpersonal relationships with other household members. The roles of elders in decision making depend on how much authority the elderly possess on the members of the households. Table 3 presents different types of households of older person's lives.

Table 3: Household living status of older people

From the above Table 3, we see that, 99.4 percent of male and 99.6 percent of female older persons live in dwelling type of household. In urban areas 97.3 percent of elderly and in rural areas 99.5 percent of elderly live in dwelling type of households. So we conclude that most older persons, either males or females or in rural or urban areas, live in dwelling households with their families.

Educational status
Education is the backbone of a nation and also is an important factor in accounting for older persons' demographic behavior. A large number of elderly persons in our country don't have any formal education and almost half of them are illiterate. From Table 4, we see that 54.1 percent of elderly males and 78.5 percent of elderly females have no formal education. Gender inequality is greatly pronounced in this respect as a large number of elderly females are illiterate with respect to their male counterparts. There is also a large difference between rural and urban areas, especially for elderly women. Table 3 represents that 56.7 and 42.1 percent of elderly males in rural and urban areas respectively, have no formal education. Also in rural areas 80.6 percent of elderly females have less education than their urban counterparts, which is 68.6 percent. The historical development of formal education focuses on the fact that before the 1950's, education was primarily confined to the upper strata of the population in our society. Formal education was perhaps out of the reach of the lower segments. Moreover, there were various social barriers for schooling especially for female children irrespective of economic condition and social settings and that phenomenon created this difference in educational status between elderly males and females and also a gap between rural and urban areas.

Table 4: Distribution of older persons by years of schooling

Very few elderly, both male and female, and both in urban or rural areas, have higher education. Only 24.5 percent of elderly males and 15.7 percent of elderly females have primary education and these percentages are higher among urban elderly than their rural counterparts. About 11.7 percent and 2.6 percent of the elderly have secondary and higher education and these percentages are higher in urban areas and also more for male elderly than their female counterparts. Only 35 elderly have completed their graduation (45.9 percent of male and 21.5 of female elderly). The same picture is found in the case of urban-rural differentials - in urban areas 46.5 percent of elderly have completed their total schooling but in rural areas that is 32.5 percent.

Working status
In Bangladesh, the largest proportion of the male work force is engaged in agricultural work and the female in household work. Therefore, obviously the elderly population may continue to work in large numbers. Even after the age 60 in our study, we observed 20.7 percent of male and 31.2 percent of female elderly population are not economically active (Table 5). It is also observed that these differences significantly differ between rural and urban older persons, which is 24.1 and 31.3 percent respectively. This is because most of the older persons in rural areas are engaged at least in agricultural work.

Table 5: Distribution of the older persons by working status

From the above Table, we have seen that, most of the older females are doing household work (58.7%). This participation varies between rural and urban women (60.2 and 52.2 percent respectively). This is because in urban areas many older females are economically active due to their educational qualification. The participation of older women in agricultural work is only 4.6 percent, in urban 3.1 and in rural 4.9 percent. We observed that the participation of female elderly population in industrial or construction or other jobs, is very poor for both urban and rural areas (Table 5).

On the other hand, most of the aged male population (51.3%) is engaged in agricultural work, which is 51.3 percent. A larger proportion of rural older persons are involved in this work (57.9%) than their urban counterparts (22.5%). In transport, construction or job in hotel and restaurant and other industrial work, there is very low participation of older males. In urban areas 18.6 percent of elderly males are involved in business but in rural areas that is only 7.3 percent.

Health status
Health is a major concern of old age. In old age the elderly are found to suffer from diseases like arthritis, back pain, high blood pressure, diabetes, asthma, ulcer, genito-urinary diseases and so on. Prevalence of malnutrition, eyesight and hearing problems and mental disorders among the elderly are also observed. However, the perception of health problems declines with advancing age. The health problems in old age are often compounded by attributing ailments of onset of old age.

Old age is only one factor that causes stress in the elderly person's life. Poverty, inaccessible services and lack of financial support make it difficult for them to weather stresses inherent to Bangladeshi life. In our study, from Table 6 we can say, almost 25.9 percent of elderly males and 19.5 percent of females have no chronic diseases and also there is a difference between rural and urban areas. In rural areas 26.5 percent of elderly and in urban areas 19.0 percent of elderly, have no chronic disease. Arthritis, and back pain are the main chronic diseases. In our study we observed that elderly females have more chronic diseases than their male counterparts. 31.5 percent of female elderly and 21.8 percent of male elderly have arthritis and 19.0 percent of females and 13.8 percent of males have back pain. These diseases also differ for young-old and old-old, i.e. for the age group 60-69, the diseases arthritis, back pain, high blood pressure are 25.3%, 17.8% and 7.8% respectively and for the old-old elderly, i.e. aged 70+, arthritis, back pain, high blood pressure are 28.4%, 13.5% and 7.1% respectively. High blood pressure differs from urban to rural areas, which is 10.7 and 4.6 percent respectively.

From Table 3 we see, heart problems are higher among those elderly who live in urban areas than their rural counterparts, which is 1.8 percent in rural areas and 8.3 percent in urban areas. About 5.5 percent and 3.9 percent of elderly suffer from asthma in rural and urban areas respectively. Due to limited medical services and urban-rural differences among the medical services, less access to health care, lack of care and mental support lead to these health problems for the elderly.

Table 6: Distribution of older persons according to main chronic diseases

Source: Abedin, 1999; Table 7

CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS

Elderly are the oldest age cohort. They have less exposure to modernization, have less education and less or no potentiality of work. They are indifferent about life and are aloof from worldly affairs. They are more or less dependent, rigid and unchangeable and also less adaptable. Above all they are the most disorganized group. They are somewhat voiceless and emotional.

Well-being of the elderly is a great challenge to us. To meet the challenge we need some solid policies and programs especially addressing the older segment of our population. Government alone cannot solve the problems of the elderly. There are many pressing issues, that the government has given priority to solving. Within budgetary constraints government is trying to do something about the well-being of the elderly.

But it is not only the job of government. INGOs, NGOs, and well-to-do persons of society should come forward to meet the challenges. There is a need to assess the short and the medium term needs of older people, in particular their basic needs - food, health, housing and care. This should be paired with available resources- the nature of livelihood and the extent of family support, taking into account trends in living arrangements and changes in household structures; the possible need to supplement the role of family networks and civil society at large; the prospects of further involvement of the elderly in the labor force and the desirability and feasibility of such an involvement.

The situation of the elderly cannot be fully explored due to unavailability of appropriate data. Therefore, a National Survey on Aging should be taken immediately. Also a Need Assessment Survey should be initiated without delay. Above all a Population Aging Research Center should be established to do research and studies of the problems and issues of the elderly population of Bangladesh.

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