Uganda > Country Background and Current Challenges
In northern Uganda, the violent actions of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) took a terrible toll on the population. For many years up to 2006, the LRA made frequent attacks on defenseless civilians, committed appalling atrocities, and recruited thousands of child soldiers into their ranks.
A total of 1.5 million people were displaced from their villages and hurriedly moved into camps of up to 60,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) each. These camps were crowded and dirty with little or no access to sanitation, clean water, or health care. Cut off from their farm lands, people became dependent on food distributions.
In the past three years, the security situation in northern Uganda has significantly improved as the LRA has moved outside of Uganda. The population has been encouraged to move back to smaller settlements and to villages of origin. As of 2009, fewer than 20 percent of the IDPs remain in the main camps[1].
However, many highly vulnerable people have been left behind in the original camps as the more able-bodied have returned to their villages of origin to re-start their farming. A major humanitarian challenge is to provide assistance to orphans, child-headed households, and the sick and the elderly left behind in the camps.
As people have moved back to their villages of origin, they have moved away from essential services such as clean water and health care that were provided in the IDP camps by NGOs and local governments. As a result, there is a demand for basic services in the new settlement sites and villages of origin, many of which were abandoned 20 years ago because of insecurity.
However, local governments do not have the capacity to meet the demand. Therefore, there is a need to work alongside local governments to rehabilitate and add to the physical infrastructure, and to increase the capacity of the local governments and health authorities to provide basic services to the populations.
Medair also works in the Karamoja region. Much of Karamoja is arid or semi-arid, so life is harsh–defined by repeated and extended droughts, cyclical cattle raiding, violence between competing clans, and chronic food insecurity. These factors have a powerful adverse impact on the livelihoods and well-being of the agro-pastoralist Karamojong people.
Key development indicators reveal that Karamoja is the poorest region in Uganda. Economic investment and development is minimal due to the threat of ambush by Karamojong warriors and due to the lack of transport and communication infrastructure. In recent years, the region has received increased attention by national and international agencies, donors, and Ugandan legislators—partly due to the prolonged drought, now in its fourth consecutive year. The region remains chronically under-developed and requires medium to long-term interventions to address food insecurity and support diversification of livelihoods.
[1] OCHA Uganda October 2009 using Inter Agency Standing Committee (IASC) figures from February as no credible update currently exists.