Uganda’s population, currently sitting at 32.7 million people, is expected to rocket to 90 million in the next 40 years. At the current and projected rates of growth, Uganda is among the five fastest-growing countries on the planet.
This is largely owing to its high fertility (or birth) rate, which has dropped only marginally in the last year. Gender discrimination against women and a lack of family planning information makes it difficult to bring fertility levels down to more beneficial levels.
When birth rates remain high while death rates decrease thanks to the increases in the overall life expectancy of a given population (usually a product of improvements in health care), the population tends to explode. This is known as the demographic trap, and it is something many poor countries go through during the process of going from an underdeveloped to a developed state.
Not only does the demographic trap put added pressure on individual families as they are forced to compete with others for scarce resources such as food, water, and gainful employment, but it puts pressure on the environment, which is forced to support more people with the same amount of resources. This means quickened environmental degradation, and some analysts speculate that it will contribute to global warming.
Importantly, these added pressures can worsen poverty and lead to food insecurity. This, in turn, may also increase the vulnerability of young people to risky behaviours such as crime and prostitution in order to make ends meet.
Prostitution of course makes women more vulnerable to sexually transmitted diseases, including exposure to HIV/AIDS. Poverty and AIDS deaths can lead to increasing numbers of orphans and child-headed households, which so very often trespass on the right to childhood, for children are left to fend for themselves or assume the domestic duties of their deceased parents and care for any younger siblings.
Today, one and a half million Ugandan children have had one or both parents die of AIDS in the past 27 years. 14 000 children are infected annually. And, in total, almost 950 000 Ugandans are HIV-positive.
Population trends, family planning decisions, and the AIDS pandemic are intricately related. In fact, a Ugandan study by University of Alberta grad student Jennifer Heys recently found that, though HIV-positive people admitted to wanting fewer children, they either don’t have the access to or awareness about contraception to be empowered to successfully see through their family planning preferences. As such, the consequences of population growth, environmental planning, and family disintegration due to AIDS are thrown into a self-perpetuating cycle called the poverty trap.
Perhaps, it is by no coincidence that the Copenhagen talks on climate change are so close to 1 December, also universally known as World AIDS Day.