44,000 young Malaysians never been to school as of 2009 - UN Official

Despite the high literacy rate in Malaysia, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) found that about 44,000 school-age children have never attended school as of 2009.

The United Nations resident coordinator and UNFPA representative for Malaysia, Michele Gyles-McDonnough said this had certain negative implications on their future, creating situations that would cost much more to solve than if the problem was averted at its inception.

"Literacy among young people are over 97 per cent while 98 per cent of young people say that they have some form of access to the Internet," she said in her opening remarks at the launching of the State of World Population Report 2014, titled 'The Power of 1.8 Billion: Adolescents, Youth and the Transformation of the Future' at Wisma UN, here, today.

She also noted the overwhelming number of Malaysians getting married at a young age and got into family life before they were fully equipped physically and mentally to bear the responsibility.

She said that more than 150,000 Malaysians married too early, at age below 19, and compromised their ability to get an education and be part of a productive labour force in a high-income nation, and instead relegated themselves to a life of dependency and under-employment.

"Early marriage denies young people the basic right to full realisation of their potential and better options must be made available to Malaysian youth.

"The 2010 UNGASS Country Progress Report showed that in 2009, 477 girls under the age of 19 presented with pregnancy at the Ministry of Health's maternal and child health clinics across the country," Gyles-McDonnough said.

She also noted that two new cases of women infected with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) were reported in Malaysia every day with women and girls accounting for 18 per cent of all newly infected persons in 2009, compared to 4 per cent in 1996.

She said there were currently over 8.4 million or 30 per cent of the nation's population comprising young people aged 10 to 24.

"The young generation needs to be empowered to transform the future by investing on them from birth to young adulthood to ensure they are fully able to unleash their power, besides trusting them in making responsible decisions.

"We need to create opportunities for our young to find their place as leaders, innovators, change-agents and entrepreneurs of the future and to close every loophole, every bottleneck that could potentially derail the life of a young person," she said.

Meanwhile, National Population and Family Development Board chairman, Tan Sri Napsiah Omar said with Malaysia's growing young population, the country had to concern itself with high-quality education and comprehensive healthcare.

She said it was important to shape and prepare the young generation to be leaders and shapers of the future while the country would experience a 'demographic dividend', where its working age population grew larger than the non-working group to create a more productive economy.

"In order to realise this demographic dividend, we have to ensure that our young people are healthy and well educated and equipped with the necessary skills. Education is indeed a very important tool for the country to propel to a higher level of development.

"On the other hand, we have to place more emphasis on stimulating rapid and inclusive economic growth and ensuring access to jobs, credit, financial services and other economic blocks," she said.