Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni has promised the United Nations Population Fund Executive Director, Natalia Kanem that Uganda is committed to improving the lives of her citizens through interventions like provision of education, health services and ultimate economic empowerment.
Museveni made the commitment after meeting Kanem at State House Entebbe on Monday.
“Like I said in Nairobi at the ICPD25 summit, a quality population is achievable if a country undergoes social-economic transformation. Concepts like gender equality are middle-class aspirations and cannot be attained in a pre-capitalist setting,” Museveni said.
Uganda is currently hosting the 8th African Population Conference that begun on Monday and ends on Friday.
Vice President Edward Kiwanuka Ssekandi, officially opened the conference held at Imperial Resort Hotel, Entebbe.
Held under the theme “Harnessing Africa’s Population Dynamics for Sustainable Development: 25 Years After Cairo And Beyond”, the conference is bringing together researchers, policy makers, programme implementers, civil society, donors and sectoral influencers to discuss issues relevant to African population, including (but not limited to) national, regional and continental investments to address rapid urbanization, population growth, sexual and reproductive health, technology, youth, the demographic dividend and capacity building.
The conference is hosted under the auspices of the Union for African Population Studies (UAPS) and Uganda’s National Population Council (NPC).
APC’s goal of the conference is to assess how Africa, 25 years after the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo, can harness its unique population dynamics for sustainable development, using rigorous evidence to establish roadmaps to respond to these critical development challenges.
The APC is organized every four years and the 8th APC aims to be the largest convening on population and development in Africa yet, with over 1,000 participants expected (900 participants attended the 7th APC held in 2015 in Pretoria, South Africa).
The conference programme will include plenaries, ordinary scientific sessions, sponsored research leader sessions, pre- and post-conference side meetings, training sessions, exhibitions and a Population Impact incubator.
Through the sponsored leader sessions, the 8th APC will offer research leaders in the field of population and development the opportunity to design and host break-out sessions on an approved topic of their choice, with the purpose of bringing together experts on population and development to engage in solution-oriented dialogue. Details for the call for papers will be communicated in March 2019.
