UGANDA’s BURGEONING YOUNG POPULATION: Boom or Ticking Time-Bomb? With almost 60 percent of its population under the age of 25, Africa is the world’s youngest continent. So it was not entirely surprising to read the latest numbers from the Uganda Bureau of Statistics this week that put that figure at 67 percent for the pearl of Africa. So, what’s the big deal with this statistic? (The pedestrian thing to do, like many of our bureaucrats do, is to quickly gloss over it.)For the many unsavory things that Adam Smith (the father of Economics) said about Africa and its inhabitants, he was a luminary that saw into the future. “The most decisive mark of the prosperity of any country,” he said, “is the increase in the number of its inhabitants.” An increase in our young population is a demographic dividend that comes with an extraordinary opportunity. While it carries the real risk of high unemployment, extreme poverty and disenfranchisement (40% of people who join rebel movements are driven to this by a sheer lack of economic opportunity), the booming youth youth population is good news for Uganda’s economy. Not only do we have the bulk of our population in their most productive years to contribute to the labor force but we also have a real opportunity at expanding our tax base (which allows for lower taxes) as well as provide internal market for goods and services.With 70 percent of our young people in rural Uganda, the silver bullet for us is value-added agriculture. A focus on skilling in this one sector could quickly solve youth unemployment. And as was the case with countries like India and China that went ahead of us on this population trajectory, international businesses, on account of cheap labor, are increasingly outsourcing or altogether transferring operations to developing countries, also contributing to job creation.But key to cashing in on this demographic dividend is investment in health, education and human capital.