The old adage by our ancestors that every child comes with their own fortunes, that encouraged the populace to produce as many children as God can allow them to have, seems to have outlived its usefulness as many new factors have come into existence requiring to regulate child production.
Women and children used to be mostly taken as a labour force with husbands as head of the family, taking the supervisory and control role, hence the many women and children a man had, the more respect and recognition and wealth one attained. Education especially for the female sex was secondary.
Since Uganda was and still is depending more on agriculture, this labour force was mainly used for agricultural production both for food and cash crops and so there was no lack of food.
With the emerging and growing of additional factors where land is becoming scarce, the constitutional right for every child to have education and to be looked after, is pushing the populace put control on their enjoyment and have only children they can adequately care for, rather than burdening other people including government and NGOs asking for assistance.
The population explosion resulting from uncontrolled child production, if not halted, will not only end up in asking for assistance from NGOs and government, but will also lead to an increase in the crime rate, violence, an increase in street children, poverty and even food scarcity, leave alone domestic violence.
The responsibility to control child production lies squarely on the government both in the central government and its local leaders, by educating parents on the dangers of unplanned child bearing and taking care of those they managed to produce. Though there is no harm in producing as many children as possible, it makes no sense when these children are not adequately cared for.
Government also has an additional responsibility of creating a peaceful environment for the citizens to live in by creating a periodical peaceful change of government.
It must be understood that whenever there is a volatile change of government forcing people to redundancy or in displaced settlement camps or in refugee camps, the end results will be the uncontrolled child production since it will be the nearest and only engagement they have.
It is important to ensure the leaders do everything possible to work towards a society since the gap between poor and rich is very wide and as long as this continues happening, the country and the World at large has a problem. There is need to close the gap between the rich and the poor.
Government programs cannot reach every individual and even if it offers free education to every child, many parents, if not sensitized on the importance of education and controlled child bearing, they will decline taking care of their children.
According to the 2022 Annual Crime report, there were 17,698 reported cases in 2022 compared to 2021, according to the report released by the police in 2023.
As of now Uganda has an estimated population of more than 45 million people.
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