Uganda: Uganda People Profile

The total people in Uganda was last recorded at 37.6 million people in 2013 from 6.8 million in 1960, changing 454 % during the last 50 years. People in Uganda averaged 17.84 Million from 1960 until 2013, reaching an all time high of 37.59 Million in 2013 and a record low of 6.79 Million in 1960. People in Uganda is reported by the World Bank.

Uganda expects a people explosion. Within the next few decades, the east African country of Uganda is likely to have the highest people increase in the world, according to a new statement from the People Reference Bureau (PRB), a Washington, D.C.-based research and advocacy group.

The country’s current people of 27.7 million is projected to explode to 130 million by 2050, a nearly fivefold increase, notes the study. According to Carl Haub, a demographer at PRB, such expansion will entrap the country in poverty and instability. “No one would consider such a rate of increase to be sustainable,” he says.

At 3.6 %, the African island country of Mayotte, an overseas collective of France located in the Comoros chain, has the highest annual rate of natural increase today, according to the study. Uganda’s current increase rate is 3.1 %, while the world average is 1.2 %.

The Ugandan government’s lack of commitment to family planning is the major reason for the country’s extraordinary people increase, says Haub. The PRB study indicates that only 20 % of married Ugandan women between the ages of 15 and 49 have access to contraception. Women in Uganda have an average of 6.9 children, compared with a world average of 2.7 and an African average of 5.1. Some government officials consider this a boon and may in fact be encouraging high birth rates; President Yoweri Museveni has called the country’s people explosion a “great resource.”

Today, the world people is 6.6 billion, with the highest human numbers in China, India, and the United States, respectively. By 2025, the world people is expected to reach eight billion, and by 2050 India will likely surpass China in in general numbers, registering an estimated 1.6 billion people

History and Ethnic Relations

Emergence of the Country. Next independence in 1962, ending a period of colonization that began in 1885, there was little indication that the country was headed for social and political upheaval. Instead, Uganda appeared to be a model of stability and evolution. It had no white settler class attempting to monopolize the cash crop economy, and there was no legacy of conflict. It was the African producers who grew the cotton and coffee that brought a higher standard of living, financed education, and led to high expectations for the next.

Independence arrived without a national struggle against the British, who devised a timetable for withdrawal before local groups had organized a nationalist movement. This near absence of nationalism part the country's ethnic groups led to a series of political compromises.

National Identity. Ethnic and religious divisions inclunding historical emnities and rivalries contributed to the country's disintegration in the 1970s. There was a wide gulf between Nilotic speakers in the north and Bantu speakers in the south and an economic division between pastoralists in the drier rangelands of the west and north, and agriculturists, in the better-watered highland and lakeside regions.

There was as well a historical division between the centralized and sometimes despotic policy of the ancient African kingdoms and the kinship-based politics elsewhere. The kingdoms were often at odds in regard to the control of land. During the colonial period, the south had railways, cash crops, a system of Christian mission education, and the seat of government, seemingly at the expense of other regions. There as well were religious groups that had lost ground to rivals in the completed, for example, the domination of Muslims at the end of the nineteenth century by Christians allied to British colonialism. All these divisions precluded the formation of a national culture.

Ethnic Relations. Next independence, there were conflicting local nationalisms. The Buganda's large people, extensive territory in the favored south, and self-proclaimed superiority created a backlash part other Ugandan peoples. Nubians shared little sense of identification with other groups. The closely related peoples of nearby Zaire and the Sudan any minute at this time became embroiled in civil wars in the 1960s and 1970s, drawing in ethnically related Ugandans. Today relations are relatively harmonious. However, suspicion remains with the president believing to favor certain groups from the west of the country over others.