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Daily Life for Children in UgandaUganda continues to be one of the poorest countries in the world with sub standard health care, high rates of malnutrition and diseases such as malaria rampant, assisted by less than half of those living in Uganda having access to safe drinking water. Around 41% of people live in poverty. Just under 50% of the population is aged 14yrs or younger and life expectancy is 64.67 years in 2024. There are an estimated 1.6 million children orphaned with 800,000 of these through AIDS/HIV. Literacy rates are relatively high at 76.53% however this falls to 63.9 % for females. 18% of children never enrol at school and a further 66%, who have enrolled, drop out during their primary and secondary school years. Attendance at school is also affected by the high rates of malaria with 40% of all students being affected at any given time. These health issues are a major concern for children in Uganda; 26,000 children under the age of five die every year die from diarrhoeal diseases and about a quarter of all children in Uganda do not have adequate food supplies for all or part of the year. As with other countries across Africa, and indeed the world, Uganda has a rising number of street children and its estimated that around 5000 children beg, scavenge, wash cars, steal or sell their bodies for daily survival. Unlike their counterparts in neighbouring Kenya, these children do not tend to sniff glue, rather bhang which is brought in from Somalia, via Moroto. It is this drug taking that the authorities account for the increase in violence in cities like Kampala.
Of course this is atypical, but nevertheless in a country where the law prohibits the labour of children under 12 years of age, the latest available figures report that there are an estimated two million child labourers in Uganda with 12,000 trapped in commercial sex, 10,000 street children and 25-30,000 children abducted from the country to engage in armed conflicts elsewhere. Furthermore, the Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS) claims 45% of children from households living below the poverty line are forced out of school to work and supplement their parents' incomes, with children aged between 5 and 17 years the worst at risk. Many children in Uganda are also abandoned by their families, often when a new father enters and existing family unit normally on the exit of an existing parent, and they end up on the streets or are rounded up in custody with the most common offence for a child to be charged with and detained for is "defilement". You can help when you volunteer in Uganda or sponsor a child there using this link here. If you want to know more about daily life in rural Uganda, check out The Lightouse Project below, well worth a read! |