Women’s Rights in Uganda

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Uganda is a small country in Africa with a population of 23,000,000 people. Most people live in very poor, rural areas and almost all of them live in poverty. Their families make less than 60,000 shillings, which is equivalent to $34.00 in America. Most of these families cannot afford to support some of their younger children, so they place them in orphanages. Currently one in twelve Ugandan children live in orphanages. Although the orphanages are funded by the government and parents pay a small amount for their children, most of them do not have enough food, medical supplies, or clothing for the children. Some families don’t have enough money to pay the orphanages and so they force their children to live on the streets, work in the public dumps to find food, or sell them into sex trafficking.
Those who sacrifice to keep their children often run into financial issues, so when their daughters start their menstrual cycle they will often sell their daughters to provide for their other children. When daughters are sold they are forced to marry whoever has purchased them. The girls who are typically between the ages of twelve to nineteen, but the men who buy these young girls are old. A fourteen-year-old girl named Betty said “My father brought a man who was old enough to be my father and told me to go with him in order to get some food. When I arrived at his home he told me he had already paid a dowry for me so I am his wife” (Plan Uganda, 1).
Young women who are forced into marriage usually have little to no say on what rights they have, and their husbands take advantage of that. If these women do not want to have sex with them, they think it is their right so they rape them. As the girls have no rights and are seen as their husban...

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...f our business. I disagree. As human beings we are responsible to help others even if they live in a different country or across a border. We need to help to these girls by forming relief groups, creating schooling programs which help these girls to say in school, and supporting them to graduate. We also need to help them to become independent and strong. There are many programs out there founded to help these girls, but you can never have too many. We can help them to become their own people, with rights to live a life without abuse.

Works Cited
"Plan Uganda." Plan Uganda. Ed. Plan Staff. Plan USA Charity, n.d. Web. 12 Mar. 2014.
Hueler, Hilary. "Ugandan Marriage Bill Pits Women's Rights Against Tradition." Voice of America (VOA). Voice of America (VOA), n.d. Web. 13 Mar. 2014.
Thompson, Janette. "Women's Rights in Uganda." Personal interview. 13 Mar. 2014.

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