A big deal was made last week of President Yoweri Museveni’s
supposed change of heart on the issue of population control.
Museveni is reported to have said in the past that he is not
too concerned about Uganda’s high
population growth rate. In fact he welcomed it as a bigger population
would be a source of labour and potential market for investors wanting to set
up here.
Champions of population control rent their hair whenever
Museveni made this view known arguing that a growing population without the
corresponding economic growth would put strain on the nation’s resources and
lower the average living standards. They argue that we need to bring the
population growth rate under control before it’s too late.
Uganda’s population is growing at 3.6 percent or put another
way if the population continues growing at its current rate into the future our
numbers will double every twenty years.
Uganda’s population stands at 35 million.
Museveni’s office later clarified that the president made
the distinction between family planning, which is good for the health of the
mother and population control, which refers to the overall growth of the population.
He is all for family planning and still wholeheartedly behind the population
continuing to grow. In his mind there was no contradiction between the two.
First of all no one wants a population that is poor, sickly
and generally cannot sustain itself. They would be no good to themselves or to
potential investors.
"To seek to control the population in order to pre-empt a poor economic environment in the future is to put the cart before the horse...
The history of populations shows that as economies grow and
health facilities improve there is a surge in numbers.
It’s not hard to see why this is so.
Societies lose less children during child birth and in their
infancy, for one.
Then as more women go to school and join the workforce,
population growth rates hit a plateau before going into decline.
As resources increase among families girls get a chance to
not only go to school but to stay in school longer, as fathers with increasing
prosperity feel less and less the need
for dowry. In addition every year the girl stays in school after she has
reached puberty is one less baby added to our population.
It is part of the explanation why urban women have low
fertility rates – the number of children they give birth to during their child
bearing years, than their rural sisters.
But also with more education and financial independence
women are better able to control their reproduction cycles either through
contraception or just deciding their choice of partner.
The history of the world will show that if you want to bring
populations under control you need to improve the economy first. As incredible
as it sounds you can have an economy that is rich but a population, while small,
which is poor.
We don’t have to go very far for examples.
The oil rich nation of Equatorial Guinea has one of the
richest populations in the world at $25,000 per capita, but is only ranked 20
places above Uganda on the UN’s Human Development Index (HDI). Uganda’s per
capita GDP stands at around $600.
The HDI measures the welfare of the society in terms of
access to, education and health services, clean water and sanitation, human
rights and other freedoms. The better a country’s HDI the better the quality of
the lives of its people.
And the population of Equatoria Guinea? The population of
this little West African nation is 1.2m people.
Two things stand out, that for population to be brought
under control the women have to be economically empowered and secondly, that
this can only happen in the context of an overall improvement in the
population’s wellbeing.
To study Europe during the industrial age or the US after
the Second World War may be a stretch but we can take a leaf from the East
Asians, who while they have had aggressive population control measures in place,
these only complemented improvements in their economy in stabilising their
population growth rates.
And finally the claim that we better watch it since our land
doesn’t have the resources to sustain a bigger population. That claim does not
stand up to the facts.
"The UK, which is the size of Uganda, has a population of 93m and a population density of nearly twice our own. Anyone who has been to the UK or knows anything about it from high school geography knows they do not hold a candle to us in terms of natural resources, but I have never heard of their population being a problem?..
There are other reasons than concern for us that is driving
this whole agenda of lower population. A story for another day.
It seems to me a linear logic, you improve the economy to
lower population growth, not lower the population growth rate to improve the
economy.
