Joyful South Koreans hope rise in births will continue

Seoul - South Koreans rejoiced on Feb 26 at news that the number of births had risen for the first time in about a decade – a rare bright spot for a country facing a deepening demographic decline.

South Korea’s statistics office earlier in the day announced that the country’s fertility rate, or the average number of babies a woman is expected to have in her lifetime, was 0.75 in 2024.

It is only a small uptick from the year before – and still far below the figure of 2.1 needed to maintain South Korea’s population of 51 million.

But approached by AFP on the bustling streets of Seoul, many saw the rising fertility rate – for the first time since 2015 – as a step in the right direction.

“The news of the birth rate rebounding after nine years is incredibly joyful for me,” said 34-year-old office worker Jun Sang-pill.

Housewife Park Ye-jin, 41, said her child had recently finished elementary school – along with only 99 other students.

That, she explained, would have been only a fifth of the kids in her graduating class when she was that age. “The graduation ceremony felt quite empty, and I felt sad,” she told AFP.

Nearby, on its vast electronic screen, Seoul’s National Museum of Korean Contemporary History displays advertisements from the country’s presidential committee on population policy – a government body set up in 2023 to find ways to reverse the declining birth rate.

Seoul has poured billions of dollars into efforts to encourage women to have more children and maintain population stability.

Experts say there are multiple reasons for the low birth rate, from high child-rearing costs and property prices to a notoriously competitive society that makes well-paid jobs difficult to secure.

‘Disappearing’ country

And state efforts had so