The youth are poorer than their parents and our Govt does not care

Let us say plainly what the GDP figures refuse to: Uganda’s young people are materially poorer than their parents.

Not poorer in degrees as we have more of those than any generation before us. But we are poorer in land, in savings, in security and if you are a young woman, you are carrying that poverty with both hands while the economy pretends you barely exist.

The 2024 Uganda Census found youth unemployment at 16.1 per cent among those aged 18 to 30, but female youth unemployment runs at 18.7 per cent, against 13.4 percent for men. Of those who work, nine out of 10 are in the informal sector.

Over half the country remains below the poverty line, beside an economy that has grown at just over six per cent annually for years. That growth has a gender: it accrues to the politically connected and to capital, not to the young woman doing unpaid domestic labour while she waits for a job that may never come.

A feminist political economy asks whose labour it is that is extracted without pay and without consequence. In Uganda, the economy runs on women’s invisible work – caring for children, the sick, the elderly – none of which appears in GDP, but all of which is assumed.

When the government refuses to fund a social protection floor, it outsources the cost of human survival onto women’s bodies and time. Our government would rather invest in champagne for the few than clean water for the many and it is women who walk furthest when the taps run dry.

Here is a calculation that no budget speech reads aloud. The little money we earn, some goes to our own survival. Then part of it goes to our parents – a generation never enrolled in any pension worth speaking of – for medication and food. Then to our children.

Young women carry the heaviest share as they are more likely to be primary caregivers for parents and children simultaneously, more likely to have interrupted their careers to do so. In a country where land, the primary inherited asset passed on to sons by custom and law, women arrive at adulthood with nothing to build on.

Wealth accumulation is arithmetically impossible, especially for women. Our governments know this and have the data. They are doing nothing about it because they have secured themselves the fat salaries, pensions, medical cover, while their children get schooled abroad.

They have no stake in a maternity ward without supplies. Uganda’s young generation is sinking under the weight of a broken economy and young women are sinking fastest. Two new ministers now hold the power to change this.

To Lt. Gen. Henry Tumukunde, the minister of Gender, Labour and Social Development General, you are expected to clean up the country of any labour abuses. However, the beneficiaries of that ministry are overwhelmingly poor, young, and female. You are none of these things (not even part of the elderly).

So, lead with that awareness or not lead at all. The young men sending money to their parents from boda-boda earnings; the young graduates that are either unemployed or earning meagre wages; the women giving birth on hospital floors or dying during childbirth; the women providing care but never appear in no GDP figure – they are your mandate. Serve them.

To Hon. Henry Musasizi, the minister of Finance, Planning and Economic Development: this is not the time to facilitate corruption and deepen suffering through budgets that protect the elite and abandon the rest.

Every shilling diverted from schools, hospitals, and social protection is a shilling stolen from a generation already running on fumes. Act with Ubuntu. Our suffering is visible. The choice to ignore it is also visible.

Uganda needs a new social contract that reflects the lives we are actually living; one that counts care work as economic work; gives women equal land rights and builds a protection floor so no young person is a one- person welfare state for their entire family. The old social contract has expired. A generation that cannot save, cannot inherit.

The writer is a feminist lawyer and Pan-African Feminist Political Economy Analyst

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