Government says population growth must be slowed down

The current rate of population growth in Uganda is unsustainable and threatens to strangle efforts to lift the country’s inhabitants out of poverty, according to officials of the Ugandan government’s population secretariat. At the same time, infant mortality remains one of the highest in the world, at 88 per 1,000, in spite of economic indicators suggesting that Uganda is prosperous when compared to other African countries. Speaking at their offices in Kampala, the spokesman of the population secretariat, Hannington Burunde, told IRIN that "our population is growing at a rate which far outstrips the resources we, as individual families and government, have to provide for it. We want to pursue the goal of stopping poverty, but this is a very hard thing for a population growing so rapidly." In last week’s budget speech, Finance Minister Gerald Ssendaula said Uganda currently had a population of 24.7 miilion, according to a census carried out last year. This is up from 16.4 million in 1991, which suggests an average annual growth rate of 3.4 percent - one of the world’s highest - compared with an estimate of 2.5 percent at the previous census. He described it as a "major bottleneck for achieving poverty reduction". Burunde said the problem was not the size of Uganda’s population so much as its rate of growth, which exceeded the economy’s ability to provide for it. "Our schools are bursting, health services will be unable to cope, and infrastructure is not there to accommodate the rising populace," he told IRIN. "There is an argument that a large population is a resource," he continued, "but this presupposes that the investment is in place to turn this population into a productive workforce. Unlike Japan or the UK, our growing population is not skilled, cannot find employment. The population, which should be an asset, becomes a liability." Paddy Nahabwe, head of demographic monitoring at the secretariat, told IRIN that the damage done by overpopulation could be seen at the household level. "The essence of the problem is big household size. Uganda has a fertility rate of almost seven children per woman. How do you feed, clothe, accommodate, find medical care and pay school fees for all these children?" he asked. "At the same time, household income is small - you don’t get paid more for having a bigger family. So a high proportion of households are in crisis," he said. Uganda’s high population growth was due to a number of factors, the officials said. For cultural reasons, women like to bear many children as a boost to social status; abundance of food in most parts of Uganda’s fertile countryside has created a perception that several children are no problem; there is a preference for bearing boys, which leads to "trial-and-error" child bearing; and family planning services are not readily available. Nahabwe said child mortality was caused, in the most part, by poor nutrition, AIDS, lack of access to immunisation, poor child care, early pregnancy and malaria.