Indo-Pacific — 600 Million Children — the Future That Already Has Owners

They are under ten years old. They live in the Indo-Pacific. The future is already doing business around them

“They are 600 million and they are not yet ten years old. While they learn to read, add, and distinguish one map from another, governments, banks, corporations, armies, and markets are already calculating what they will consume, where they will work, how much they will produce, what debt they will inherit, what technology they will use, and under which commercial flag they will grow up. The future, as always, arrived before they did: it already has contracts, corridors, ports, algorithms, and prices. The children are still playing; the adults have already divided up the table. And perhaps that is the most obscene irony of the twenty-first century: before they learn to sign their own names, the world has already mortgaged part of their childhood.”

CORE COUNTRIES OF THE INDO-PACIFIC SPACE

South Asia: India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Nepal, and Bhutan.

Southeast Asia: Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, Brunei, and Timor-Leste.

East Asia: China, Japan, South Korea, North Korea, and Taiwan.

Oceania and the Pacific: Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Samoa, Tonga, Kiribati, Tuvalu, Nauru, Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia, and the Marshall Islands.

Under a broader definition of the Indian Ocean: countries in East Africa and island states in the Indian Ocean, such as Mauritius and Seychelles, may also be included. Some strategic conceptions extend the space as far as East Africa.

.China and India are absolutely central. In fact, any definition of the Indo-Pacific that excluded either one would lose much of its geopolitical meaning.

.The United States’ Indo-Pacific strategy explicitly treats China as a central actor in the Indo-Pacific space and India as one of its principal regional partners.

.The Indo-Pacific strategy is explained in relation to the more than 80 million children in the Interoceanic Axis of North America, which will be developed in another column.

SIX HUNDRED MILLION

Nearly six hundred million children under the age of ten live in the Indo-Pacific. They are between zero and nine years old and are spread across India, China, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Myanmar, Thailand, Japan, the Koreas, Australia, New Zealand, and the small Pacific states. They do not form a homogeneous generation. A child born today in Tokyo, another in a village in Bangladesh, and another in a Rohingya camp may share the same ocean and the same century, but they do not share the same chances of eating well, receiving medical care, drinking safe water, studying, or reaching adulthood with the same opportunities.

Around them lies one of the greatest concentrations of economic, technological, and military power on Earth. The United States spent approximately US$954 billion on defense in 2025; China, US$336 billion; Russia, US$190 billion; India, US$92.1 billion. Europe spent around US$864 billion. Asia and Oceania, where a large share of these children live, reached US$681 billion in military spending. The great powers know the Indo-Pacific perfectly well: they know its straits, ports, critical minerals, semiconductors, markets, trade routes, bases, ocean depths, and the distances required for a missile to reach the place where it was programmed to arrive.

They also know the children. The United Nations, UNICEF, WHO, the World Bank, and governments themselves have spent decades counting infant mortality, malnutrition, access to water, vaccination, poverty, and school enrollment. We are not dealing with invisible human beings or unknown problems. There are satellites capable of observing territory, submarines capable of crossing oceans without surfacing, missiles that travel thousands of miles, and budgets capable of financing them. There are also vaccines, food, water-treatment plants, hospitals, schools, and teachers. The science required for both already exists. What changes is the amount of money, organization, and urgency that adults decide to place behind each one.

During the coming decades, these children will inherit the region that the United States, China, Russia, India, and the European Union now view as a space of competition, trade, security, and influence. They will become workers, doctors, engineers, farmers, scientists, teachers, mothers, and fathers. Some will not even reach the age of ten. Others will arrive malnourished, displaced, or without having learned to read properly. Meanwhile, the great powers will continue carefully calculating range, tonnage, deterrence, budget, and strategic position.

“The Indo-Pacific cannot be understood without India or China. India gives it its western half; China concentrates much of its eastern economic and strategic power. One contributes the Indian Ocean; the other dominates much of the Asian Pacific chessboard.”

“Six hundred million still do not know what Indo-Pacific means. It does not matter. The adults have already decided how much the territory where they were born is worth.”

THE LOTTERY OF BIRTH

The six hundred million are not distributed evenly. India concentrates around 234 million children under ten; China, close to 150 million; Pakistan exceeds 45 million; Bangladesh has approximately 32 million; Indonesia is around 30 million; the Philippines, close to 20 million; Vietnam, 15 million; Myanmar, 9 million; Thailand, around 7 million. Japan and South Korea, aging societies with very low birth rates, represent a much smaller fraction. Then come Malaysia, Cambodia, Laos, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Australia, New Zealand, and the small Pacific island states. Geography places them within the same region; the cradle immediately begins to separate them.

Being born in Japan, Australia, or South Korea means, on average, being surrounded by health systems, drinking water, sanitation, schooling, and social protection considerably stronger than those available to millions of children born in poor rural areas of Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, or some Pacific islands. Even within the same country, the difference can be enormous. China and India contain cities capable of competing technologically with any Western capital and, simultaneously, rural territories where income, nutrition, sanitation, medical care, and school quality still depend far too heavily on where the coin of birth happened to land.

The five lions know those differences perfectly well. The United States seeks alliances, markets, and strategic positions; China deploys trade, credit, and infrastructure; India builds its own economic and security sphere; Russia preserves military, energy, and diplomatic ties; the European Union offers trade, investment, cooperation, and financing. Roads, railways, ports, power plants, and economic corridors can genuinely improve the lives of millions of people. They also serve national interests. No great power arrives in the Indo-Pacific solely because it discovered children who needed drinking water.

The contradiction begins precisely there. In a region capable of manufacturing advanced semiconductors, nuclear reactors, satellites, aircraft carriers, submarines, ballistic missiles, and some of the largest infrastructure ever built by humanity, there are still millions of children whose futures can be determined by a latrine, a vaccine, one daily meal, a nearby school, or a few miles of pipe. Scientific knowledge is not lacking. Nor is industrial capacity. And, looking at the military budgets of the same actors, it is difficult to maintain that the global problem is simply the absence of money.

A child does not choose country, family, income, ethnicity, city, village, war, or border. Nor does a child participate in the meetings where others decide investments, alliances, sanctions, military budgets, or spheres of influence. A child simply arrives. Then the accounting begins.

“They were all born in the same Indo-Pacific. The small inconvenience is that some were born considerably more Indo-Pacific than others.”

WATER

The Indo-Pacific contains a contradiction that is difficult to hide behind any strategic map. In South Asia alone, around 347 million children lack access to safely managed drinking water, according to UNICEF. India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and other countries live with contamination, inadequate sanitation, droughts, floods, and enormous differences between cities and rural areas. For a small child, the result does not belong to geopolitics: it means diarrhea, infections, malnutrition, hours spent walking to obtain water and, in the most serious cases, a perfectly preventable illness that can end up killing them.

Those same waters contain an extraordinary concentration of military power. The United States deploys nuclear submarines and aircraft carrier groups; China possesses one of the largest navies in the world and continues expanding it; India is developing nuclear submarines and strengthening its naval presence in the Indian Ocean; Russia maintains a nuclear submarine force capable of operating across enormous distances; France, as a European Union military power with territories in the Indo-Pacific, maintains permanent forces in the region. They are extraordinary machines. They can produce drinking water for their own crews during long operations, navigate submerged for months, and carry weapons systems whose development costs billions of dollars.

No one needs to sell a submarine to build a water pipe. The comparison would be too simple. The uncomfortable point is something else: both technologies exist simultaneously. We know how to desalinate water, purify it, pump it, store it, and transport it. We know how to build sewer systems, treatment plants, and sanitation networks. And we also know how to enrich uranium, manufacture compact reactors, build nuclear submarines, develop ballistic missiles, and guide them toward targets thousands of miles away. In both cases, engineers, materials, energy, money, organization, and a political decision are required.

The United States, China, Russia, India, and the European Union talk about security in the Indo-Pacific. Each understands that security according to its own interests, alliances, and threats. But for millions of children, the first security frontier may be twenty yards from their homes, inside a glass. They do not need to know who controls a maritime strait. They need what they drink this morning not to make them sick tonight.

The Indo-Pacific possesses some of the most sophisticated military technologies ever built and economies capable of mobilizing hundreds of billions of dollars when they believe their security is threatened. A few miles away, or a few thousand, another technological problem waits for a considerably less spectacular priority: getting clean water into a small mouth.

“We build machines capable of crossing oceans beneath the water. Getting water to reach a child clean remains technically more complicated.”

EATING

Eating seems too elementary a need to occupy an important place in Indo-Pacific strategy. Yet in South Asia, approximately one in three children under five suffers from stunting, one in ten suffers from wasting, and one in four is born with low birth weight, according to UNICEF. Across Asia-Pacific as a whole, around 71 million children under five suffer from stunting and 30 million from wasting. These are not innocent statistical concepts: they mean bodies and brains beginning their development with fewer nutrients than they need.

Hunger is also not born solely from the physical absence of food. Poverty, food prices, family income, access to land, water, fertilizers, energy, transportation, storage, wars, climate disasters, and the functioning of markets all play a role. A family can live in a country that exports food and still have a malnourished child inside its home. India is a major agricultural power; China has enormous food production; the United States ranks among the world’s major agricultural producers and exporters; Russia is fundamental in grains and fertilizers; the European Union has a powerful agricultural sector. The capacity exists. Distribution decides who ultimately eats.

The five lions then appear around the same plate. The United States, China, Russia, India, and the European Union intervene through agricultural trade, fertilizers, energy, credit, humanitarian assistance, infrastructure, and logistics chains. But they also intervene through sanctions, strategic rivalries, trade restrictions, and security decisions capable of changing prices and supplies far beyond their own borders. When fuel, fertilizer, or grain prices rise, the discussion may begin in a ministry ten thousand miles away; it ends in a family cutting one meal.

And while that vulnerability remains, the Indo-Pacific continues to militarize. Aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines, bombers, fighters, drones, and missiles require extraordinarily precise logistics chains. A modern military calculates fuel, spare parts, food, ammunition, and transportation because no commander would accept sending a force without supplies. The logistics required to feed human beings, therefore, are not some unknown technological mystery.

Children do not need to understand those contradictions. The body of a three-year-old does not distinguish among geopolitics, inflation, trade blockade, drought, or poverty. It simply receives enough protein, vitamins, and calories, or it does not. And what is missing during the first years can accompany that child for the rest of life.

“Food security has hundreds of international conferences. Curiously, the stomach still demands food.”

NOT DYING

Before learning to read, a child has an even more elementary task: staying alive. During recent decades, much of the Indo-Pacific has made extraordinary progress in that direction. East Asia and the Pacific is home to nearly 490 million people under eighteen and has recorded major improvements in child survival, vaccination, schooling, and health care. China radically reduced infant mortality; India has achieved important progress; Bangladesh represents one of the notable cases of mortality reduction despite having far lower incomes than developed economies. Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand are among the countries where dying in childhood is now exceptional.

Precisely for that reason, it is impossible to present every child death as an inevitable fatality. Vaccines, antibiotics, oral rehydration, adequate nutrition, safe water, sanitation, prenatal care, health personnel, and primary care are known technologies. They do not belong to the future. Nor do they require discovering a new law of physics. When a child dies from diarrhea, pneumonia, malaria, malnutrition, or another preventable illness, the difference between living and dying can often be found in an available vaccine, a known medication, a nearby nurse, or a few hours of distance from a health center.

The five lions possess immense medical, scientific, and industrial capacities. The United States, China, Russia, India, and the European Union produce medicines, vaccines, medical equipment, scientific knowledge, and highly specialized personnel. India is also a fundamental component of global pharmaceutical production. Those same powers possess military systems capable of installing field hospitals, transporting tons of supplies by air, operating intercontinental logistics chains, and mobilizing human resources within hours when they believe a situation affects their security.

The comparison is not intended to turn a missile into a vaccine or a submarine into a hospital. It shows something more difficult to avoid: mobilization capacity. An aircraft carrier requires thousands of people, fuel, food, medicine, maintenance, and a continuously functioning logistics chain thousands of miles from its base. Keeping a military force alive in the middle of the ocean is an organizational feat. Keeping a sick child alive in a village also requires organization, but the needs are considerably smaller.

The progress already achieved demonstrates that reducing these deaths is possible. Wherever vaccination, nutrition, sanitation, and primary care arrived in a sustained way, mortality fell. That is why every advance also contains an uncomfortable question: if we know how to do it, why does it still not reach everyone?

“When we know the medicine, possess the technology, and the money exists, an avoidable death stops being only a medical tragedy.”

THE MAP MOVES

For millions of the six hundred million children, the map where they were born will not remain exactly where it was. Bangladesh faces flooding, cyclones, river erosion, and salinization; the Philippines repeatedly receives destructive typhoons; Vietnam has extensive coastal areas and the Mekong Delta exposed to sea-level rise; Indonesia combines flooding, heat, and coastal vulnerability; Pakistan has suffered floods capable of covering enormous areas of territory. In the small Pacific island states, some children will grow up knowing that the sea is not merely scenery: it can also advance over homes, crops, and freshwater reserves.

Climate change enters children’s lives in brutally concrete ways. A flood can close a school, contaminate a well, destroy a harvest, and force a family to move. A drought reduces food and income. Extreme heat affects health, work, and learning. Between 2016 and 2022, 15.6 million children were displaced in South Asia by climate- and weather-related disasters, according to UNICEF. For the coming decades, the organization warns of tens of millions of potential new child displacements if exposure increases and adaptation proves insufficient.

The five lions do not observe this map from the outside either. China, the United States, India, Russia, and the European Union are enormous consumers and producers of energy, although with very different economic structures, historical emissions, and accumulated responsibilities. At the same time, they possess capital, engineering, technology, and industries capable of building coastal defenses, early-warning systems, resilient electric grids, reservoirs, adapted housing, health infrastructure, and agriculture prepared for more extreme climatic conditions. The problem is not only determining who emitted how much. It is also deciding who will finance what now has to be built.

And once again, security appears. In the Indo-Pacific, enormous resources are invested in monitoring oceans, protecting sea lanes, building bases, deploying submarines, buying fighter aircraft, and developing missiles. The same satellites that observe military movements can track cyclones; the same engineering capable of protecting a naval base can protect a coastal city; the same military logistics that evacuate personnel can evacuate communities. The capacities exist. What changes is when a threat acquires enough importance to mobilize them.

For a child in Bangladesh, the Philippines, or a small Pacific island, “climate adaptation” can mean something considerably less academic: that the house remains standing, that the school reopens, and that after the next storm there is still water to drink.

“The sea has not read the summit communiqués. That is why it continues rising without waiting for consensus.”

THE CHILDREN WHO DO NOT COUNT

Within six hundred million there is always the danger that some children disappear without dying. They disappear from the main statistics because they are refugees, internally displaced, stateless, undocumented, child laborers, or residents of territories the state can barely reach. Myanmar provides one of the most brutal examples. After years of persecution, violence, displacement, and war, around 1.2 to 1.3 million Rohingya live as refugees in Bangladesh. Among them we place our 400,000 children under ten. That is an enormous number. Within six hundred million, they represent approximately 0.067%.

That is where the trap of numbers begins. Four hundred thousand children would require an entire city in which to live; placed inside a continental population, they can become a decimal. In Cox’s Bazar they need food, water, sanitation, vaccines, doctors, schools, protection, and some answer about their future. Many were born outside Myanmar and have never known the territory from which their families fled. They are growing up between one country that shelters them but cannot indefinitely turn the camps into a permanent solution and another to which safe, voluntary, and dignified return remains extraordinarily difficult.

They are not alone. Myanmar also has enormous internal displacement caused by the conflict following the 2021 military coup. In Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other parts of the Indo-Pacific there are displaced children, refugees, and children subjected to child labor. The causes and magnitudes differ, but a common condition appears: the weaker the legal and state protection around a child, the easier it becomes for that child to disappear behind administrative categories.

The five lions know the Rohingya problem and the Myanmar crisis perfectly well. The United States and the European Union use sanctions, diplomacy, and humanitarian assistance; China has important economic and strategic ties with Myanmar; India shares a border, security interests, and connectivity projects; Russia maintains political and military ties with Myanmar’s authorities. None is completely without instruments. What differs are their interests, their policies, and the amount of pressure they are willing to exert.

Meanwhile, the major powers of the Indo-Pacific can track naval movements by satellite, monitor straits, control borders with sensors, and move military forces thousands of miles. Locating four hundred thousand children is not the problem. We know where they are. Nor are we unaware of approximately what they need. The problem begins after counting them, when someone has to decide what to do with them.

“Four hundred thousand children look like a multitude. Inside six hundred million they can easily become a footnote.”

THE LIONS KNOW HOW TO ADD

Now the calculator appears. In 2025, the United States allocated approximately US$954 billion to military spending; China, US$336 billion; Russia, US$190 billion; India, US$92.1 billion. Together, Asia and Oceania reached US$681 billion, 8.1% more than the previous year. Europe reached approximately US$864 billion. These are not promises, estimated needs, or funds awaiting approval. It is money that states were actually willing to mobilize during a single year for what they defined as defense and security.

We are not proposing the abolition of armies or pretending that states can ignore threats, borders, wars, or national defense. The United States, China, Russia, India, and the countries of the European Union have real strategic interests and different ideas about how to protect them. They build submarines, aircraft carriers, fighter jets, bombers, missiles, satellites, radars, drones, bases, and defense systems. Each can explain why it considers doing so necessary. Precisely for that reason, the interesting comparison is not to ask how much a missile costs and how many schools we could buy if it disappeared.

The question is considerably more uncomfortable: what other threats receive a similar capacity for mobilization? We have found 347 million children without access to safe water in South Asia alone; tens of millions suffer from stunting or wasting; millions reach the age of ten without properly understanding a text; others remain outside sufficiently robust health systems, lose their homes to disasters, or grow up as refugees and displaced persons. None of these threats needs an enemy crossing a border to cause harm.

The five lions know how to mobilize capital, industry, and technology when they consider an objective urgent. The United States can deploy an aircraft carrier group; China can build gigantic infrastructure; Russia can sustain complex military and space capabilities; India can develop nuclear weapons, missiles, satellites, and a powerful technology industry; Europe can mobilize hundreds of billions when its perception of security changes. The problem, therefore, is not proving that such capacity exists. We are looking at it.

And there we return to our six hundred million. Water, food, primary care, and education are also security infrastructure. The difference is that their beneficiaries do not wear uniforms, control maritime straits, or participate in security councils. They are between zero and nine years old.

“To defend the future they found US$681 billion in Asia and Oceania in one year. Now they still have to find the future.”

2046

Take one of them. He is four years old. He may have been born this morning in India, China, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, or Myanmar. He could also live in Japan, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, or a small Pacific island. In 2046 he will be twenty-four years old. Another who is nine today will be twenty-nine. By then the six hundred million we have counted will no longer be children. They will constitute a gigantic part of the adult population of the Indo-Pacific.

They will be engineers, farmers, doctors, workers, scientists, teachers, programmers, merchants, and entrepreneurs. They will be mothers and fathers. Some will wear uniforms. Others will emigrate. Some will run companies, hospitals, universities, or public institutions. Millions will work in factories, fields, ports, mines, offices, and cities that do not yet exist. There will also be unemployed people, displaced people, and refugees. What happens during these first ten years will determine a considerable part of the differences with which they arrive in 2046.

India will receive its largest generation. China will face a much older society. Pakistan and Bangladesh will carry enormous young populations. Indonesia and the Philippines will need to convert demographic growth into education and employment. Vietnam will continue its industrial transformation. Myanmar will have to decide what country it hands to the children who survive its conflict. Japan and Korea will need precisely what is beginning to become scarce: young people. Australia, New Zealand, and the small Pacific nations will face an ocean that is economically, strategically, and physically different.

The five lions will also still be there. The United States, China, Russia, India, and the European Union will continue defending interests, seeking markets, building alliances, and competing for influence. Perhaps today’s aircraft carriers will have been replaced; submarines will be quieter; drones, autonomous; missiles, faster; artificial intelligence will have penetrated deeply into the economy and warfare. No one can know who will then have the largest fleet or who will control each technology. Nor do we need to know.

We do know something else. The children who drink contaminated water today will arrive differently. Those who suffer malnutrition will arrive differently. Those who at age ten cannot understand a text will arrive differently. Those who receive vaccines, food, clean water, education, and protection will arrive differently as well. No strategy written in Washington, Beijing, Moscow, New Delhi, or Brussels will be able to escape that arithmetic completely.

In 2046 they will produce, build, research, vote, care, fight, govern, and have children. They will no longer be the future of the Indo-Pacific. They will be the Indo-Pacific.

“For twenty years they debated who would own the Indo-Pacific. They forgot to ask who was going to live in it.”

600 MILLION AND 80 MILLION — TWO FUTURES ON DIFFERENT SCALES

The difference between **600 million children in the Indo-Pacific** and nearly **80 million in the Interoceanic Axis of North America** does not represent a demographic defeat for anyone. Quite the opposite. The Indo-Pacific possesses something that many ***aging*** societies will probably look upon a few decades from now with a rather inelegant mixture of concern and envy: an enormous child and youth population. There are India and China, with nearly 3 billion inhabitants between them, accompanied by Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Vietnam, and other young or still highly populous societies.

That number of children and young people means future workers, engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs, consumers, researchers, technicians, doctors, and citizens. Those countries will provide them with education, food, health care, housing, infrastructure, and productive jobs, and that enormous generation will become one of the great economic and technological engines of the twenty-first century. For decades, Asia was described as the region that had to catch up with the developed world. Perhaps the question is beginning to reverse itself: **what will the developed world do when it discovers that it possesses accumulated capital, technology, and wealth, but fewer and fewer young people to sustain them?**

The Interoceanic Axis of North America presents another reality. It has far fewer children, but it concentrates enormous economic, technological, financial, university, and industrial capacities. The United States, Canada, and Mexico form one of the most important productive spaces on the planet; Central America and the Caribbean add a young population, trade routes, resources, and maritime connections; Panama physically joins the two oceans. They are two different scales and two different demographic structures. One has more accumulated capital. The other possesses a human reserve capable of becoming future capital. History, with its customary lack of courtesy, rarely places every advantage on the same side.

And there appears what may be one of the great questions of the century: what will happen when the enormous youth population of the Indo-Pacific finds sufficient education, technology, infrastructure, and capital to transform its demographic weight into full economic capacity? Perhaps then some countries that today explain to the rest of the world how development should be done will discover a small statistical inconvenience: the future needs money, but it also needs people young enough to build it.

“Having hundreds of millions of children is not a burden when a country knows how to educate them, feed them, and give them room to create. It can be exactly the opposite: while some count retirees, others are educating those who will manufacture, program, design, research, and consume throughout the second half of the century.”

“Demography has a rather cruel sense of humor: for decades, countries with too many children are looked down upon, and when those children become engineers, scientists, workers, and consumers, people suddenly begin talking about strategic competition.”

“Aging countries can accumulate buildings, stocks, bonds, and factories. There is one thing they cannot import with the same ease: twenty years of youth.”

“China and India did not enter the twenty-first century carrying too many people. They arrived accompanied by a human reserve that will become one of the greatest concentrations of talent, production, and consumption history has ever known.”

Author: Mauricio Herrera Kahn

Bibliography and Verification Sources

1. United Nations — Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (UN DESA). World Population Prospects 2024.

Demographic base for population by country and five-year age groups, especially ages 0–4 and 5–9, used to construct the population under age ten in the Indo-Pacific.

2. UNICEF Data. Demographics — Child Population. Child population statistics by country, region, and age; used to cross-check the demographic estimates employed in “600 Million.”

3. UNICEF East Asia and Pacific. The State of Children in East Asia and the Pacific 2025. Situation of approximately 490 million people under eighteen in East Asia and the Pacific: survival, nutrition, vaccination, education, protection, and inequalities.

4. UNICEF South Asia. *Safe Water, Bright Future. Drinking water, sanitation, and child vulnerability in South Asia; source for the approximate figure of 347 million children without access to safe drinking water.

5. WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply, Sanitation and Hygiene (JMP). *Progress on Household Drinking Water, Sanitation and Hygiene. Internationally comparable series on safe water, sanitation, and hygiene by country.

6. UNICEF South Asia. Regional reports on *Maternal and Child Nutrition. Indicators on stunting, wasting, low birth weight, and child malnutrition in South Asia.

7. UNICEF. *Child Food Poverty: Nutrition Deprivation in Early Childhood. Nutritional situation of young children, dietary diversity, child food poverty, and regional differences.

8. WHO, UNICEF & World Bank. *Joint Child Malnutrition Estimates. International database on stunting, wasting, and overweight among children under five; allows country-by-country verification of nutritional figures.

9. UNICEF South Asia. Reports on *Learning Poverty* and basic education. Data on children who reach approximately age ten without being able to read and understand a simple text adequately.

10. UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS). Databases on enrollment, schooling, completion, literacy, and out-of-school children. Allows comparison of national educational differences.

11. World Bank & UNESCO. *The State of Global Learning Poverty. Methodology and statistics on the inability to read and understand a simple text at approximately age ten.

12. United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation — UN IGME. *Levels & Trends in Child Mortality. Neonatal, infant, and under-five mortality, with comparable national series.

13. World Health Organization (WHO). *Global Health Observatory. Vaccination, mortality, communicable diseases, health personnel, coverage of essential services, and primary care.

14. UNICEF. Immunization databases. Child vaccination coverage and “zero-dose” children, particularly relevant to South Asia and East Asia-Pacific.

15. UNICEF South Asia. *Weathering the Future. Child displacement related to floods, storms, droughts, and other weather events; support for the 15.6 million child displacements recorded in South Asia during 2016–2022 and their projections.

16. Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC). *Global Report on Internal Displacement. Internal displacement caused by conflicts and disasters in Bangladesh, the Philippines, Pakistan, Myanmar, Indonesia, and other Indo-Pacific countries.

17. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). *Sixth Assessment Report — Working Groups II and III.* Climate risks, sea-level rise, coastal vulnerability, adaptation, and regional differences in Asia and the Pacific.

18. UNHCR — United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Rohingya Emergency. Rohingya refugee population in Bangladesh, camp conditions, protection, displacement, and prospects for return.

19. UNHCR Bangladesh. Operational Data Portal — Rohingya Refugee Response.Registration and demographic composition of the Rohingya refugee population in Cox’s Bazar and Bhasan Char.

20. International Organization for Migration (IOM). Rohingya Humanitarian Crisis Response. Humanitarian information on shelter, water, sanitation, health, mobility, and camp conditions.

21. United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Humanitarian reports on Myanmar and Asia-Pacific. Internal displacement, conflict, humanitarian access, and vulnerable child populations.

22. International Labour Organization (ILO) & UNICEF. *Child Labour: Global Estimates. Child labor, affected economic sectors, and regional distribution.

23. World Bank — *World Development Indicators. GDP per capita, poverty, urbanization, sanitation, water, education, health, and socioeconomic indicators used to compare the conditions into which children are born.

24. Asian Development Bank (ADB). *Key Indicators for Asia and the Pacific. Poverty, infrastructure, education, health, economic development, and regional inequalities.

25. SIPRI — Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. *Trends in World Military Expenditure 2025. Source for military spending by the United States, China, Russia, India, Europe, and Asia-Oceania, including annual growth percentages.

26. SIPRI Military Expenditure Database. Historical and comparable series of national and regional military expenditure used to verify the figures in Chapter IX.

27. United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Human Development Report.Human development, income, education, life expectancy, and inequalities among the countries considered.

28. United Nations ESCAP. Economic and Social Survey of Asia and the Pacific. Economic development, inequality, social protection, climate change, and regional infrastructure.

29. FAO — Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World* and FAOSTAT. Agricultural production, food insecurity, food availability, and nutrition.

30. WFP — World Food Programme. Regional and national reports for Asia-Pacific. Food insecurity, humanitarian assistance, nutrition, and vulnerability to conflicts and disasters.

Primary statistical base for the column: United Nations/UN DESA for the 600 million; UNICEF, WHO, UNESCO, and UN IGME for the situation of children; UNHCR/OCHA/IOM for displaced populations and Rohingya; IPCC/UNICEF for climate; FAO/WFP for food; World Bank/ADB for socioeconomic conditions; SIPRI for the military calculator.

Mauricio Alvarez