Uganda generally has a degree of inequality that fluctuates somewhat but over time seems largely unchanged,
as does the share of people below its poverty line in recent years.
The overall level of welfare inequality in the country had a slight upward trend,
with a Gini coefficient of 0.36 calculated for the 1992/93 census and a World Bank calculation of 0.43 for the year 2019,
with the coefficient rising significantly in the years 2002/03 and 2009/10 during its fluctuation [@Lwanga-Ntale2014; @Atamanov2022].
However, the overall aggregation masks several important distinctions:
Rural inequality on the whole is lower than urban inequality, with Lwanga-Ntale [@Lwanga-Ntale2014] findings coefficients of 0.35 and 0.41 for 2012/13 respectively.
Additionally, he sees quintile inequalities primarily driven by the highest quintile (0.25) with the middle-incomes less affected (0.05-0.07),
however he also finds a significantly higher coefficient for the first quintile (0.14).
These inequality levels remain mostly unchanged from 2012/13 to 2019/20 but hide qualitative dimensions such as the shift out of a lower-income agricultural livelihood predominantly taking place amongst older men who have at least some level of formal education and are from already more well-off households [@Atamanov2022].
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Atamanov et al. [-@Atamanov2022] go on to examine the share of people below the poverty line in Uganda:
around 30% of households are in a state of poverty in 2019/20,
which once again fluctuated but roughly reflects the share of 30.7% households in poverty in 2012/13.
Two surges in rural household poverty in 2012/2013 and 2016/17 can be linked to droughts in the country,
with an improvement in 2019/20 conversely being linked to favorable weather conditions.
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Ssewanyana and Kasirye [-@Ssewanyana2012] find that in absolute terms poverty fell significantly (from 28.5% in 2005/06 to 23.9% in 2009/10) but there are clear relative regional differences emerging,
with Western Ugandan households increasing in poverty while Northern and Eastern households reduced their share of households below the poverty line.
Additionally they find, while transient poverty is more common than chronic poverty in Uganda,
nearly 10% of households continue to live in persistent or chronic poverty.
Lastly, for a long time it has been seen as an issue that Uganda puts its national poverty line too low with the line being put between 0.94 USD PPP and 1.07 USD PPP depending on the province (lower than the international live of 1.90 USD PPP),
while van de Ven [-@vandeVen2021] estimate a living income of around 3.82 USD PPP would be required for a national poverty line that meets basic human rights for a decent living.
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Esaku [-@Esaku2021; -@Esaku2021a] finds a somewhat circular driving relationship between Ugandan inequality, poverty and working in what calls the shadow economy:
inequality increases the size of the informal economy, as a large subsistence sector creates revenue tax shortfalls,
undermines the governments efforts to attain equitable income distributions in the economy and the creation of social safety nets for the poort, who, in turn,
have to turn to the informal economy to secure their livelihoods,
increasing its size both short- and long-term and feeding back into the cycle.
Additionally, slow structural change ---
further impeded by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which pushed both urban and rural residents back into poverty ---
leaves a low-productivity agricultural sector which becomes,
in combination with a lack of education, the strongest predictor of poverty:
the poverty rate in households with an uneducated household head (17% of all households) is 48% (2019/20),
while already households with a household head possessing primary education (also 17% of all) nearly cuts this in half with 25% poverty rate (2019/20) [@Atamanov2022].
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In 1990 a policy initiative to shift from a supply-driven to a demand-driven model for rural drinking water provision was enacted which, over time,
improved rural safe water coverage slightly but also made operation and maintenance of improved water sources pose a challenge that could impede long-term access to safe water.
In the country, access to improved water sources rose from 44% in 1990 to 60% in 2004 and 66% in 2010 [@Naiga2015].
In 2019, access to improved sources of drinking water in the country is at a level of 87% in urban areas and 74% in rural areas, with relatively little inequality in rural regions between poor and non-poor households [@Atamanov2022].
Health care facilities in rural areas are generally well connected to improved sources with 94% of facilities having access to public stand posts, protected spring technology, deep boreholes and some to rain harvesting tanks, gravity flow schemes or groundwater-based pumped piped water supplies [@Mulogo2018].
Households, on the other hand are generally less well connected.
