Uganda’s population hits 46 million
Statistics body, UBOS has announced that Uganda’s population is just a few hundreds of lives short of 46 million.
Speaking during the release of the 2024 census preliminary results, Dr. Chris Mukiza, the census commissioner said UBOS covered 11 million households, an increase from the 7.2 million households covered in 2014.
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“Uganda’s population is now 45.9 million up from 34.6 million in 2014 . This means there is an increase by 11.3 million in the last 10 years. That number has refugees to a tune of 780061 while the average household size is 4.4 from 4.7 in 2014,” Dr.Mukiza said.
“We have 51% females in our population which means males are fewer.”
The preliminary results show that youths now account for 22.7% of Uganda's population while the elderly are at 5%.
Government set May, 9, 2024 as the census night onto which all census questions were referenced by UBOS
This was the first digital census that Uganda has ever held as enumerators for the first time used tablets to fill the information.
It was also the 11th census to be conducted in Uganda, with first one in 1911 and sixth post-independence and had five sets of questionnaires for households, institutions, accommodation facilities like hotels, floating population and community.
Challenges
Mukiza said there were a number of hard-to-reach areas including islands, mountainous areas that made it difficult for enumerators to carry out their job.
“There was failure to access some households in gated communities, unavailability of respondents, especially single person households, refusals to be counted by some religious cults especially in Busoga region and the geography of some areas which was not updated on the system,” Dr.Mukiza said.
He said internal border conflicts like the Apaa land conflict between Amuru and Adjumani, Palaro between Gulu local government and Amuru among others, especially in Northern Uganda.
“We had failed to penetrate Apaa until we got some lady, Winnie Ochaya who volunteered to be a coordinator. We tried to send UPDF to protect but failed until this lady came and counted 100%.”
The census commissioner applauded UPDF, Police , Uganda Prisons, Internal Security Organisation and Electoral Commission for their active participation in form of provision of enumerators and vehicles to transport materials.
He said UBOS is now going to undertake post enumeration survey to check the quality of the census data but also do further data analysis and publication of final census results in September.
