Challenges
Reducing Poverty by Sustainable Growth
Sustainable economic growth requires creating new jobs and enterprises without sacrificing our irreplaceable natural resources. It is a challenge all societies face, but none faces it more urgently than Ugandans as we struggle to rise from a low-income to a prospering middle-income nation.
We recognize the successes of the last two decades in reducing by half the proportion of our population living in extreme poverty. Yet progress has been stymied by growing income inequality, so that an unacceptably high 24.5 percent of Ugandans are still in extreme poverty, and we remain one of the poorest nations in the world. Even more unacceptable is the concentration of poverty in rural areas, especially northern Uganda.
Plunder Not a Solution
Unsustainably exhausting our natural resources is not the answer for reducing poverty, or we would have erased poverty in Uganda long ago. History shows that this path is self-defeating and would leave us even poorer and more vulnerable.
Where a half-century ago we could blame colonial powers for plundering our natural resources, we can blame only ourselves for the damage happening around us since independence and self-rule. Once-protected natural resources like wetlands and forests, even national parks, have been reduced to commodities for sale to the highest bidders – degrading these priceless treasures at an alarming rate.
It is as if our elected leaders embraced the colonial model as our own to continue the plunder of Africa in the belief that consuming irreplaceable resources is a natural, beneficial stage in our development – ignoring the growing threat to our long-term environmental and economic future. It is like continuing to milk a cow without ever feeding it. Our own short-term thinking is the real barrier to sustainable prosperity in the future.
Sustainability is the Solution
Long-term thinking that commits Uganda to sustainability is the answer. For example, research over the last quarter-century shows that undisturbed wetlands produce wealth year after year, forever. In a recent study of one rural community in Tanzania, researchers found that healthy wetlands directly produced annual earnings of $320 per household, a significant financial improvement for its poorest residents. Further, the enormous value of natural areas to our prospering tourism industry is unchallenged.
NAPE is committed to sustainable economic growth in every aspect of our work, with the certainty that this is the surest way to poverty reduction and prosperity. This is consistent with Millennium Development Target 7A, which states, “Integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programs; reverse loss of environmental resources.”
By preventing such exploitation as clear-cutting a forest, filling in a wetland, strip-mining in a national park, or careless production of oil in a fishing lake, we are preserving and enhancing the value of our patrimony to future generations – to enable a lasting prosperity for them.
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