Uganda: UN Decries Poverty Levels

from All Africa

Elias Biryabarema
Kampala

UGANDA is still plagued by "massive poverty" and the welfare of a broad section of the population is appallingly inadequate, the United Nations top advisor on the Millennium Project, Prof. Jeffrey Sachs has said.

"Doubtless, the situation in Uganda is woefully inadequate. There's so much rural poverty in Uganda," he said. He was briefing journalists about his impressions on Ugandan's development rate vis-à-vis Millenium Development Goals (MDGs), a global agenda for development by 2015.

The Millennium Project is the UN's main vehicle for efforts to achieve a set of the eight MDGs. Some of them include halving the number of people suffering extreme poverty, universal access primary education, cutting by two thirds the mortality rate in children under five years, halting and reversing HIV infection rates and others.

Mr Sachs said even as the macroeconomic dynamics are firmly under control, the general welfare situation remains awfully dire. Sachs' assessment of Uganda's poverty levels and the seeming note of despair that he sounded, seems to contradict the government's report released in December 2006 indicating that a sharp spike in income levels in the last four years had curtailed the number of Ugandans in absolute poverty from 39 per cent to 31 per cent.

According to the report which was based on the National Household Survey by the Uganda National Bureau of Standards (UBOS), incomes have risen largely on the back of soaring agricultural prices, notably coffee. Northern Uganda was cited as having the most grim poverty rates, standing at 60 per cent - almost double the national average.

Amidst all the gloom, Mr Sachs said Uganda still had a fair chance to achieve many of the MDGs especially combating HIV/Aids and malaria, halving poverty and children mortality rates.

That possibility is premised on what has already been realised in a Millennium Project village called Ruhiira near Mbarara town in South Western Uganda. Run as an experiment of what is achievable when aid is strategically and prudently spent on improvement of key welfare areas, villagers there, Mr Sachs said, have seen their living conditions improve spectacularly.

"In just about a year, these people have all acquired bed nets - dramatically reducing the incidence of malarial infections, accessed clean water, infrastructure has improved and food production soared with the help of fertilisers," Mr Sachs said. Ruhiira is one of the dozens of villages the UN is running in a couple of countries as experiments to show the feasibility of realising MDGs by the target year of 2015.

Mr Sachs is widely known to advocate profuse infusions of fresh aid into impoverished countries like Uganda as a way of sparking a big economic push and uplifting the masses into middle income levels.