Uganda’s current reproductive health approach not yielding results, CSOs say

Civil Society Organisations have said the current reproductive health approach for Uganda is not yielding so much results as intended.

“One in four young people aged 15 to 19 has either had a pregnancy or having a child. In the Uganda Demographic and Health Survey (UDHS) of 2011 to 2016 we were at 24% and 2017 up to 2022,  we are still at 24%  and sometimes we even threaten to even go higher despite the heavy investment for many years,” Jackson Chekweko, the  Executive Director for  Reproductive Health Uganda said.

“This has a negative consequence to us as a country since our future largely depends on the young people who constitute the majority. This means the approach to reproductive health is the wrong one.”

He was on Thursday speaking during the annual knowledge sharing conference for CSOs working on gender, SRHR and other issues affecting youth in Uganda held at Hotel Africana in Kampala.

Chekweko said statistics show that Uganda has made slight progress in contraceptive while 43% of the young people before the age of 19 are married which he noted means Uganda has almost half of its young population deprived of their future because they have been transitioned at a tender age to marriage.

“This should keep ourselves asking if we are doing right. This is an indication of policy and we should be asking ourselves if our policies are right. Is our leadership making the right choices and making enough effort to make change?  As country we have been talking a lot about values. When we want to talk of sexuality of young people, a number of our people run to our young people asking that they should abstain.”

“However, scientific evidence has shown that young people are diverse. We have young people who are either in school and  stable families to whom the message of abstinence is appropriate and will heed to it. There is also a group of young people with different and difficult backgrounds and context within which they are growing. There is a lot of sexual abuse right from their homes like refugee camps and slum areas but also many of youths in these areas have resorted to sex for pay. The approach to them should be a message of safer sex practice.”

The Reproductive Health Uganda Executive Director insisted that different approaches and messages should be disseminated to different groups of youths but noted this is not the case, as current messages are increasingly shying away from this fact.

“We need to inform the young people that in case things go bad, emergency contraceptive can work to protect yourself against pregnancy. These are the messages which we are increasingly shying away from yet this is the reality and the end result is this unimpressive statistic.”

He however insisted that it is the role of all stakeholders and not only CSOs ought to champion this message of change in approach.