Uganda has been widely praised for its open-door policy towards refugees. The country has about 1.4 million refugees, estimates the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR), the third highest number in the world after Turkey and Pakistan. The South Sudanese who make up the bulk of the refugees in Uganda look unlikely to return any time soon, with a peace deal signed more than a year ago yet to be implemented.
In Uganda, a developing country where land is still relatively plentiful, refugees are already encouraged to build their own houses and use their gardens to grow food to supplement their U.N. rations. Many have set up small businesses, but the remoteness of their settlements means work opportunities are limited. Although allowed to move freely, they need to stay close to the settlements to access food and medical assistance. The government allocates new arrivals a plot of land big enough to build a mud-brick house and plant a small vegetable garden, gives them freedom of movement – they live in settlements, not camps - and the right to work. But like many host countries which are itself in need of aid, it is struggling. Global aid budgets are being squeezed with the UNHCR warning this month that the "gap between needs and available funding continues to grow" and the United States, which once accepted large numbers of refugees for resettlement, now takes far fewer.
Uganda's minister for disaster relief and preparedness, Musa Ecweru, said his country needed more funds to help refugees develop new skills and farm better. But he said the world had a responsibility to create the conditions that would allow refugees to return home, calling the surge in numbers a "collective failure".
"It is the only durable solution," said Ecweru. "For as long as they are persecuted, I will welcome them. But that does not suggest that I am capable of protecting them"
Victor Odero, regional advocacy director for the global aid agency International Rescue Committee (IRC), said there needs to be a shift in focus from standalone interventions in a crisis to economic empowerment of refugees.
"Humanitarian aid is short term and largely underfunded. Those long-term development goals are the first to be cut when budgets are reduced," he said, calling for a "total paradigm shift" in refugee aid. The IRC provides new farmers with seeds, and funds the hire of a tractor to plough newly acquired land.
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