Russia’s Oryol becomes first region to offer $1,200 to schoolgirls for giving birth

The Oryol region in central Russia has become the country’s first to offer cash incentives to schoolgirls who give birth after Governor Andrei Klychkov expanded an existing program on Thursday.

The region is one of 40 across Russia that currently provides at least 100,000 rubles ($1,200) to female university students for having children starting this year. The new decree extends these payments to school-age girls, according to exiled news outlet 7x7.

The measure comes as Russia faces a worsening demographic crisis, exacerbated by its war in Ukraine. President Vladimir Putin has emphasised boosting birth rates, stating that families with three or more children should become “the norm.”

At the same time, reproductive rights are under increasing pressure. Russian authorities have banned “child-free” lifestyles as “extremist ideology,” outlawed “coercion” into abortion and expanded maternity benefits to promote childbirth.

Official data shows Russia’s birth rate has dropped to a 25-year low, while mortality rates continue to climb.

President Vladimir Putin, who has cast Russia as a bastion of “traditional values” locked in an existential struggle with a decadent West, had encouraged women to have at least three children, saying that will help secure the future of Russians. There are already financial and other incentives.

Some 599,600 children were born in Russia in the first half of 2024, which is 16,000 fewer than in the first half of 2023 and the lowest since 1999. The number of deaths jumped by 49,000. However, immigration jumped by 20%.

Russia’s lower house of parliament voted unanimously on November 12 to ban what authorities cast as pernicious propaganda for a child-free way of life, hoping to boost a faltering birth rate.

Official data released in September put the birth rate at its lowest in a quarter of a century while mortality rates are up as Moscow’s war in Ukraine rages on. The Kremlin called the figures “catastrophic for the future of the nation”.

Estimates in the CIA’s World Factbook put Russia among the 40 countries with the lowest birth rate in 2023 at around 9.22 per 1,000 population, slightly ahead of Germany at 9.02 but well behind China at 9.7 and the United States at 12.21.

With inputs from agencies