KUWAIT CITY, 23 May 2004 — Kuwait’s population rose by 5.1 percent to 2.484 million in 2003 from 2.363 million the previous year, the state news agency KUNA yesterday quoted the Planning Ministry as saying.
Kuwaiti nationals represented 913,500, or 36.8 percent of the population, up from 884,550 in 2002, an annual growth rate of 3.3 percent. Kuwaitis formed 37.4 percent of the population in 2002.
An official report in March 2000 expected the number of Kuwaitis to exceed the one million mark in 2007 at the current growth rate. Expatriates made up 1.571 million of the total population by the end of last year, a 6.2 percent rise on 1.479 million in 2002.
Kuwaiti females, who represented 464,000, outnumbered their male counterparts by about 15,000.
But expatriate females, who numbered 508,000, accounted for only 32.3 percent of the total number of foreigners. The 1.062 million males accounted for 67.7 percent.
Some 400,000 expatriates, the majority of them women, work as domestic helpers in the state. The report said Kuwaitis under the age of 15 numbered 375,800 and accounted for 41 percent of the indigenous population, while 474,500 nationals were under 20 and constituted 52 percent of all Kuwaitis.
The foreign male population also outnumbered the indigenous population.
According to previous statistics, Kuwait’s foreign population comprises, among other nationalities, around 295,000 Indians, 274,000 Egyptians, 157,000 Bangladeshis, 101,000 Pakistanis and 100,000 Sri Lankans. Britons, other Europeans, and North Americans make up less than 20,000 of the population.
The people residing in Kuwait are primarily Arab in origin, but less than half of them are from the Arabian Peninsula. Many Arabs from nearby states took up residence in Kuwait because of the prosperity brought by oil production after the 1940s.
