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Tag: UBOS Report

  • The 2024 Census Report & Why Museveni Must Invest More In Youths & Religious Institutions

    The 2024 Census Report & Why Museveni Must Invest More In Youths & Religious Institutions

    Led by UBOS Chairman Dr. Albert Byamugisha and Executive Director Dr. Chris Mukiza, the authors of 2024 final census report have highlighted the reasons why the government of President Museveni can’t afford to ignore prioritising and investing in interventions which directly empower Uganda’s youths, religious leaders and religious institutions.

    It’s made very clear in the 351 page report that of the roughly 46m people Uganda has, only 0.2% (roughly 85,559) are ireligious and confessed to having nothing to do with rsligion at all. The rest-99.8%- made it clear that they are religious with a whopping 82% of them confessing to be Christians & 13% being Muslims.

    The report indicates that such “levels of religiosity” illustrate the enormous influence religious leaders and clergy wield in contemporary Uganda. Accordingly, the GoU is urged to tap into this influence and deliberately involve the clergy, religious leaders and institutions into the implementation, popularisation and rolling out of key mindset change and social economic transformation programmes and interventions.

    That the clergy have to deliberately be involved in civic education and community mobilization in order to increase the success of interventions like Parish Development Model and public health undertakings among others.

    Simultaneously, the same report shows why the GoU has no option but to prioritize the empowerment and capacitation of it’s youths and the country’s young people more than ever before. That of the 45.9m people in the country, roughly 50% are children aged 0-17 years; 24% are youths aged 18-30 years and a mere 5% comprises of seniors or older persons aged 60 years and above. The remaining 21% comprises of adults aged 30-60 years.

    The report authors base on all this statistics to propose steps that have to deliberately be undertaken by the GoU to effectively harness the attendant ‘demographic dividend.’ That, to ensure that such a young population is turned into an opportunity, as opposed to being a burden, the GoU should deliberately invest in their quality education, skilling and health access to meaningfully secure their future.

    That it’s only through investing in their collective appropriate health, education and skilling that the GoU will ever be able to sustainably increase the employability of its youths. That the same will enhance productivity of labor in Uganda. And its only through increased skilling that the GoU’s job creation and monetization of the economy programme interventions will sustainably yield the desired outcomes.

    The report also calls on the GoU to become more deliberate and invest more in long term planning aimed at achieving sustainable management and use of the country’s land resources which are inelastic yet the population density (number of persons living per square kilometer) increased from 2014’s 173 persons to 190 only 10 years later.

  • REPORT: Here’s Where Majority Land-Owning Ugandans Live & Hail From

    REPORT: Here’s Where Majority Land-Owning Ugandans Live & Hail From

    Comprising of 351 pages, the 2024 census final report had it’s authors go a long way to demonstrate the level of accomplishment and quality of life majority Ugandans are living.

    Access to and ownership of land is one of the proxy indicators the census report authors leveraged to paint a picture. The report, in some part, reflects on the number of people in each of the country’s statistical sub regions who own the land on which they live, work or operate from. 33% of adults living in rural areas own land compared to urban Ugandan areas where only 24% own some land.

    In rural areas, you have 13.5m adults aged 18 and above of whom 9m (or 67%) don’t own any land at all. In comparison, urban Uganda, which has 8.7m people dwelling there, has 6.6m (or 76%) of them owning no land at all.

    When it comes to sub regions, Kampala City has 956,355 adults aged 18 and above dwelling there of whom 806,138 or 84% own no land at all.

    The report shows that of the 9.72m of Uganda’s male adults aged 18 years and above, 6.2m or 63% do not own land at all. Only 3.6m or 37% do. When it comes to female adults (aged 18 & above), they number 12.5m of whom only 3m or 24% own land. A whopping 9.5m or 76% don’t own any.

    Still on this same welfare proxy indicator, the problem of landlessness is more pronounced among urban dwellers than among the rural population.

    Among the 5.5m adults in Buganda, 4.4m or 80% own no land at all. And the following is how other sub regions fair: Busoga has 2,044,906 adults 1.5m or 78% of whom are landless and Bukedi has 1,118,350 adults of whom 830,453 or 74% are landless.

    Bugisu’s adult population is at 943,455 of whom 640,796 or 68% are landless; Sebei has 184,430 adults of whom 65% is landless; Teso has 1,140,233 adults of whom 63% are landless; Karamoja has 642,806 adults of whom 59% are landless; Lango has 1.3m adults of whom 54% are landless and Acholi has 996,397 adults 63% of whom are landless.

    Landlessness among adults in other statistical sub regions stands as follows; West Nile 66%, Madi 70%, Bunyoro 72%, Tooro 64%, Rwenzori 64%, Ankole 65% and Kigezi 56%.

    Among the uneducated Ugandans, landlessness stands at 72%, primary school dropouts at 65%, among those who completed primary 67%, among those with some secondary education 77.4% and among those who completed secondary 77.3%. And among children aged 10-17 years, land ownership is at 4.2% for males and at 3.6% among female ones.

    Among the youths aged 18-30 years, land ownership is at 21% among males and 14% among females. Children become land owners mainly through bequeathment and inheritance. Among older persons (aged 60 and above), land ownership is at 61% among males and 44% among females.

    The different population groups who the census enumerators assessed regarding land ownership as a welfare proxy indicator totalled up to 22,234,988 of whom only 6.6m or 30% owned land. A whopping 15.6m or 70% don’t own any.

    As UBOS governing board chairman Dr. Albert Byamugisha has suggested, this though-provoking data and statistics ought not to dispirit the leaders and decision-makers of this country but to only guide them onto the journey of evidence-based decision-making while designing the appropriate interventions aimed at mitigating the situation.

  • Good News as Census Final Report Shows 7 in every 10 Ugandans Have More Than One Pair of Shoes & Decent Clothing

    Good News as Census Final Report Shows 7 in every 10 Ugandans Have More Than One Pair of Shoes & Decent Clothing

    The final report for the 2024 census exercise is out and it shows general improvement in the quality of life majority Ugandans are living.

    The country roughly has 46m people of whom 44.4m live in well designated households (technically categorised as the household population) and another 1.6m are categorised to be the non-household population.

    This latter category refers to people who reside in establishments like hotels. The same category comprises of others who were enumerated from the streets like street children, employment camps, diplomatic residences and others in transit (who where basically enumerated as travellers in buses etc).

    Some of the shoes Olivia Ansell sales in Uganda 

    In total, Uganda has 10.7m households, which the report defines as a group of people who live and eat together. The average size of the Ugandan household is established to be comprising of 4.2 persons compared to 2014 when it was 4.7 per household. And briefly, this is how it has evolved over decades: 4.7 during the 1969 census and 4.8 in 1991.

    When it comes to how decently and how well members of these households (the 44.4m people) live, the report shows that 69% of the 10.7m households reported to have their members or occupants owning at least one pair of shoes and more.

    The same 69% of households confirmed having each and everyone of their members or inhabitants having at least 2 sets of clothing and more. This indicates improvement in ordinary Ugandans’ quality of life inspite of all the other challenges.

    UBOS census enumerators obtained this information through putting specific questions to households’ heads and members during the actual census exercise.

  • UBOS REPORT: Only 2 in Every 10 Poverty-Stricken Ugandans Targeted to Benefit From PDM Trillions Are Being Impacted by The Programme

    UBOS REPORT: Only 2 in Every 10 Poverty-Stricken Ugandans Targeted to Benefit From PDM Trillions Are Being Impacted by The Programme

    In a bid to reduce on the number of people and households still being trapped under subsistence way of life, President Museveni did promise mitigation during the campaigns for 2021.

    He rightly stated that it was unacceptable to have 3.5m households being totally excluded from the money economy largely because they don’t produce anything for sale and also don’t have money to spend to buy or acquire what they require for their basic day to day survival needs.

    The 3.5m is just households and not actual number of people inhabiting them. And gratefully, the newly released final census report by UBOS has established that Uganda currently has a total of 10.7m households of which 7.2m or 67% are in money economy with something to sell besides having capacity to part with money to purchase and get what they need.

    The census report, based on data thousands of UBOS enumerators collected across the country during the month of May 2024, shows that of the 10.7m households we currently have in Uganda, 33% or 3.5m still live under subsistence.

    UBOS boss: Chris Mukiza

    The UBOS report authors define subsistence to imply households which are financially so hard-up to the extent that their inhabitants are unable to adequately satisfy their basic needs specifically those relating to the purchase of food and non-food items. It’s this category of Ugandans, financially excluded and very vulnerable, that President Museveni sought to emancipate through the introduction of Parish Development Model.

    According to Secretary to Treasury (PSST) Ramathan Goobi, as of last November, Shs2.06trn had been given out to cover such vulnerable groups under the PDM arrangement. The money was meant to cover such vulnerable groups in at least 10,589 perishes.

    On Friday 22nd November, Goobi disclosed on his X handle that in the targeted parishes and districts, the Shs2.06trn was supposed to be distributed to cover up to 80-100% of intended beneficiaries.

    However, during his ongoing PDM mobilisation and inspection tours across the country, the President has established that the very crippling problem of extortion and stealing of PDM funds is widespread and has vowed to crack the whip on culprits real hard.

    According to the President, the PDM cash is meant to capacitate people living in the 3.5m targeted households to begin earning some money through undertaking appropriate activities and break away from the subsistence way of life which has seen then depend on nature-enabled activities such as hunting, gathering and rudimentary agriculture in order to make ends meet and afford basic survival.

    The findings contained in the latest final census report by UBOS vindicate what the President has been saying namely that a lot of the intended beneficiaries have largely remained unimpacted because of extortion schemes by officials in the relevant local government structures across the country.

    The UBOS-hired census enumerators went asking questions during the enumeration exercise while asking people if they had benefited at all from the PDM trillions. The report shows that of the 3.5m households the President rightly targeted, only inhabitants of 832,746 (basically 24%) admitted to ever benefiting from or getting impacted by the PDM intervention at all.

    The 3.5m households targeted are the ones in subsistence and badly need emancipation to have higher incomes and lead a better quality life. Remarkably, the census final report establishes that Sebei sub region has registered the highest impact for PDM with 76% of the targeted households being impacted already.

    Yet Busoga sub region is the least impacted with just 14.3% of the intended households benefiting. The report doesn’t render any explanation as to why Sebei has done so well and Busoga so poorly.

    When it comes to gender, the UBOS report shows that males are benefiting much more than females from the PDM intervention. Of the 832,746 households that had so far been impacted as of May 2024, a total of 628,561 were male-headed households and a mere 204,185 female-headed.

    The UBOS census report also unearthes equally very intriguing findings regarding the impact of other government interventions aimed at improving household incomes and welfare such as OWC, YLP, Emyoga, UWEP for women, SAGE for citizens aged 80 or more, Special Enterprise Grant for Older Persons (aged 60-79) and NAADs which has since been disbanded under the ongoing rationalization of government agencies. This aspect of the report will be detailed in our subsequent coverage of the census final report.