KAMPALA, UGANDA – President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni has urged Ugandans to abandon witchcraft and superstitions, embracing scientific thinking and modern ideas.
Speaking at the release of the preliminary results of the National Population and Housing Census 2024, President Museveni emphasized the importance of adopting a scientific approach to understanding the world.
The President congratulated the Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS) for conducting a successful census exercise and thanked Ugandans for their cooperation. He noted that the census results, which show a population increase of 11.3 million over the last decade, vindicate the National Resistance Movement’s (NRM) strategy on population growth.
“You need to change the organic structure of society and start pushing for new ideas, not simply saying have less children because even the belief that we don’t want to be counted is part of that problem since our people believed that when you count children, they will die,” he urged.
The Minister of State for Planning, Hon. Amos Lugoloobi, thanked President Museveni for successfully championing the National Digital Census. “We thank you, Your Excellency, for approving and funding the digital census, and we pray that the government embraces the idea of digitizing service delivery across government to get real-time results,” Hon. Lugoloobi stressed.
Dr. Albert Byamugisha, UBOS Board of Directors Chairperson, attributed the success of the census exercise to the positive contribution of all Ugandans. “The product we are receiving today has been enabled by each one of us in one way or the other, for instance, the government under the able leadership of Your Excellency, which prioritized the census exercise and allocated sufficient resources for its successful implementation,” Dr. Byamugisha noted.
The Executive Director of UBOS, Dr. Chris Mukiza, revealed that the bureau had 135,230 field workers, 14,669 enumeration supervisors, and 4,715 sub-county/division supervisors, with five sets of questionnaires. He also announced that Uganda’s population now stands at 45,935,046 people, an increase of 11.3 million over the last decade.
The 2024 National Population and Housing Census was conducted electronically from May 9-19, 2024, with a mopping-up exercise until May 26, 2024, to ensure complete coverage in the Greater Kampala Metropolitan Area and hard-to-reach districts.
