The latest Population Reference Bureau report indicates that Uganda has the world’s second youngest population. Up to 48.7 per cent of Ugandans are under 15 years of age. This explosion of young people places the country at the edge of a demographic challenge. Saturday Monitor's Evelyn Lirri asks how Uganda will employ and feed these numbers.
It’s a time bomb! But one that will take another thirty years to explode and when it does, Uganda could find itself unable to feed its population, it will not have enough schools, hospitals, there will be more squalid settlements and traffic jam will probably be ten times worse than what we know of today.
Thousands will be jobless and ultimate chaos could be the rule other than the exception leading to serious political mayhem but only if, as a country we do not control our population growth.
The average age of Uganda’s 31 million people is just 15 years, ranking the country in second position in the world with the youngest population after Niger, according to the 2010 world data sheet from the Population Reference Bureau.
But a young population with more consumers than producers has enormous implications for a developing country like Uganda, particularly in the area of social services and the growth of the economy in general.
The PRB data sheet shows that in sub-Saharan Africa, young people make up more than 42 per cent of the total population, and there are only 1.3 working-age adults for every child under 14.
In more developed countries, children under 14 make up only 17 per cent of the total population, and there are 4.1 adults of working age for every child under 14. As a result, youth dependency or the number of children economically dependent on the working-age population is relatively low.
“In countries such as Uganda, where a woman has on average more than six children, there is a 1-to-1 ratio of working-age adults and children under 14. This high youth dependency burdens governments, communities, and families as they try to meet the needs of large, young populations,” the report reveals.
Demographers' take
Demographers agree that providing for the needs of young people, particularly education and healthcare makes more economic sense if it is distributed over a larger number of working adults, which is the challenge that Uganda will have to confront as it tries to satisfy the needs of the bulging numbers.
Mr Charles Zirarema, the acting director at the Population Secretariat, explains that having more than half of a country’s population under the age of 18 years not only stretches the economy, it also makes it highly dependant.
According to the National Development Plan, the dependency ratio stands at 110 per cent - meaning that for every nine workers, there are 10 dependents. The result of this has been high unemployment coupled with a high dependence burden, denying the country the potential contribution of this redundant labour force.
“The danger is that you have a small working group stretched to service the young largely unproductive group of people,” said Mr Zirarema. Yet this is not about to change. If anything, Uganda’s population is increasingly becoming younger, with the proportion of children under the age of 18 having increased from 51 per cent in 1969 to 56 per cent when the 2002 National Census was conducted.
Population boom
The Population Secretariat says this population boom is likely to eventually overwhelm government. In a report titled “Uganda: Population Factors and National Development”, it notes that Uganda’s population has been growing rapidly from five million in 1948 to 31 million by 2009.
Like the global population that rose from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 6.9 billion in 2010, much of this bulge is a consequence of high fertility rates and an equally high unmet need for family planning services.
In Uganda, fertility rate stands at 6.7 per cent among women of child-bearing age, while contraceptive use is at a low 23 per cent.
Projections from the Population Secretariat show with continued high fertility, the population would increase from about 30 million to 50.9 million in 2022 and 88.8 million by 2037.
But in the case of a declining fertility projection, the population would increase to 62.4 million persons in 2037, meaning there would be nearly 26.6 million fewer persons. Health experts say one underlying reason for the high fertility rate is the high teenage pregnancy where women start child bearing as early as 14 years.
Uganda has one of the highest teenage pregnancies in Africa (25 per cent). Dr Peter Ibembe, the national programme manager at Reproductive Health Uganda (RHU), says the majority of young females in Uganda are married off by the age of 24 and two in three women in the country begin childbearing by the age of 19.
“Part of the reason for this is that not all young people have been reached with reproductive health services,” says Dr Ibembe. Because reproductive health services don’t easily reach young people, he explains that contraceptive use among this category of people remains at a low 10 per cent compared to the national average of 23 per cent. This has consequently led to a high rate of induced abortion; many using crude high risk methods and maternal deaths among young girls under 24 years of age
supports making available adolescent sexual and reproductive health services, inadequate enforcement and implementation has led to many young people being left out of key reproductive health messages.
The introduction of free primary education in 1997 was meant to increase the enrolment of girls in school but also delay marriage which could consequently reduce early pregnancies. But a high dropout rate-especially among girls had frustrated the programme.
“This is the reason why we are advocating that young girls should be allowed to go back to school even after giving birth because their future will be affected if we allow them to continue having more children when they are young,” said Dr Ibembe.
Experts observe social services, housing, jobs and opportunities have not expanded at the same pace as population growth.
The Population Secretariat report has projected that if population continues to grow at its current pace, it will affect all sustainable development objectives in virtually all sectors-health, education, agriculture, environment, economic development and urbanisation.
“A fast growing population only discounts all other gains in education, health and infrastructure. With a lower growth rate, we would have a lot more gains,” says Prof. Augustus Nuwagaba, a development economist at Makerere University.
The report has projected that if fertility rate continues as it is the number of pupils in primary school will increase from the current 7.5 million to 18.4 million by 2037. This would require a significant rise in the number of teachers from 152,000 to 459,800 in the same year.
However if fertility were to drop to 2.2 per woman, the number of children in primary school would only increase to a modest 10.3 million by 2037, and this would require only an additional 253,900 teachers. According to the report, over the projection period, the cumulative saving made by having to fewer teachers and children in school would be Shs230bn.
“Some of the savings could be used to increase expenditures to achieve and sustain free education, enhance teacher training and improve classrooms,” the report notes.
The effect of the high population growth is also being felt in the health sector. It is projected that the need for health facilities will increase with the continued rapid population growth and better health seeking behaviours.
In 2007, there were 3,045 health centres II, III and IV-or I, for every 9,500 people. If this ratio per person of health centres continues in the future, with a high fertility rate the country would need 9320 health centres by 2037. But with a restrained fertility rate- this figure would be 6,550 health facilities.
Public health costs would also rise with increasing fertility.
Job pressure
Due to the growing young population as well as a high fertility rate, population and development experts observe that Uganda is likely to face an increase in job creation pressure for the youth over the coming decades.
Unemployment is already a huge challenge in the country, where officials say almost 400,000 students graduate from tertiary institutions every year only to compete for 18,000 government jobs created in the same period.
Consequently, those who fail to enter the job market end up in the informal sector or without jobs at all. The NDP is what the government believes will transform Uganda from a predominantly peasant society to a middle income country by 2015.
It shows that out of the 12 million Ugandans in the working age group, only 6.4 million were actively working by 2002.
One of the constraints to the performance of the labour and employment sector, according to the NDP is the current education and training system which prepares graduates to be job seekers, other than job creators. Mr Zirarema says Uganda will need to change the education system to reflect the needs of the economy, but also address the growing unemployment.
“There is a mismatch between what is learnt in schools and what the job market offers,” he said. Development experts like Prof Nuwagaba agree.
According to him, while the country has a relatively well educated population; most of this populace is not skilled. This is in part because the current higher education training system is more theory based and less focused on practical, hands-on teaching.
According to Prof. Nuwagaba, many graduates are missing out on good jobs because the education curriculum does not place enough emphasis on practical skills
“Getting a university degree is not a big deal any more. What the country needs is a person who is able to earn a living by the skills that they hold but not the degree,” he says.
He argues that Uganda needs to redesign the teaching curriculum so that it focuses on the skills needed to develop its human capital and make it more competitive.
“What we should be seeing are innovative and skilled graduates who are able to create goods and services, and not just graduates looking for jobs. Countries like Malaysia have done this successfully,” he told Daily Monitor.
With the current high population growth rate of 3.2 per cent per annum, Prof. Nuwagaba says Uganda will need a GDP growth rate that is four times the population growth rate. At the moment, Uganda’s economy is growing at an annual rate of six percent, meaning that the population is growing faster than the economy can support.
This means that to sustainably support a huge population, GDP growth rate should be at least 12.8 per cent by 2037. “This is likely to be unachievable given that even a country like China which has the highest GDP growth in the country at the moment is growing at 10.3 per cent,” said Prof. Nuwagaba.
While a big population size has generally led to prosperity in many countries like China, Prof. Nuwagaba says Uganda’s fast exploding population is a liability.
“Uganda’s population is a poor quality one because it’s highly dependant, unskilled and doesn’t create demand and jobs.”
Big labour force
According to him, Uganda will have to ensure that its labour force is far larger than both its dependant young population and older population-with the ability to generate wealth, save and invest. Demographic gift or dividend is the rise in the rate of economic growth due to a rising share of working age people in the population
Demographic dividend usually happens when fertility rate falls and the youth dependency ratio declines. The drop in fertility rate was one of the key factors that, for example, helped Thailand and Singapore-which once had the same GDP per capita as Uganda to become middle income economies in a single generation.
The government hopes to address challenges of population and development through its recently launched NDP and the National Population Policy. The NDP addresses structural bottlenecks in the economy in order to accelerate socio-economic transformation for prosperity like creating employment, raising average per capita income levels, improving the labour force distribution and improving Uganda's competitiveness.
The national population policy was also launched in 2008 to address development challenges posed by a rapidly growing population
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