Note: Uganda’s total fertility rate, 5.9 children per woman, is one of the highest in the world, and is higher than the Sub-Saharan average of 4.8. The UN’s ‘medium variant’ estimate predicts that the population of Uganda will rise from 33 million in 2010 to 94 million by 2050 and 171 million by 2100.
ANNE MUGISA and CATHY MWESIGWA write in ALLAFRICA.COM:
President Yoweri Museveni has cautioned that the population issue in Africa should be put in its proper context and discussed without complacency, exaggeration or panic.
He observed that industrial societies do not have time to generate so many children and added that evidence shows that in Africa too, middle class women also do not have time to generate children endlessly.
Speaking at an international family planning summit in the UK Wednesday, Museveni said that population growth isn’t the problem but, according to him, underdevelopment and lack of social-economic transformation as well as child spacing which would ensure the health of babies and mothers.
Museveni was accompanied to the summit by his wife, First Lady and Minister for Karamoja, Janet Museveni.
He urged African governments and their development partners to sensitise the peasant women about child spacing to ensure spaced and planned child births. READ MORE.