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Paper short abstract

Uganda’s SRH is shaped by colonial legacies prioritizing population control. Community-led, rights-based approaches show how reproductive justice grounded in local knowledge, autonomy, and collective wellbeing offers sustainable, decolonial alternatives to top-down models.

Paper long abstract

Sexual and Reproductive Health (SRH) in Uganda and across the African continent remains deeply entangled with legacies of population control paradigms, shaped by colonial and Neo‑colonial development frameworks, conditional funding, and externally driven targets. Despite progressive rhetoric on women’s autonomy, realizing reproductive justice continues to be undermined by governance structures that distort SRH financing, narrow policy priorities, and reinforce biomedical, Western‑centric norms that marginalize local knowledge, community agency, and culturally grounded models of care.

This paper investigates how reproductive justice defined as the right to have children, not have children, and parent in safe environments is mobilized by grassroots actors in Uganda to resist population control logics and advance locally rooted SRH futures. Drawing on national data showing entrenched unmet need for contraception (over 40% among adolescents) and persistently high rates of unintended pregnancies and unsafe abortion, particularly among young women, this paper argues that current SRH policies too often prioritize numerical fertility reduction over responsive, rights‑based care.

Using case studies from community led family planning uptake increases in Adjumani (from ~27% to ~49%), midwifery‑led models of care, and collaborative local health initiatives that integrate traditional practitioners with formal health services, the paper demonstrates how community agency reshapes SRH delivery beyond top‑down models. These examples point to sustainability and culturally legitimate care grounded in dignity and autonomy. Moreover, the paper explores how global funding shifts including recent closures of family planning clinics due to aid cuts exacerbate inequities and foreground the politics of reproductive governance.