Kampala, Uganda
Kampala for All: Safety Nets for Recovery
Uganda hosts approximately 1.4 million registered refugees, mostly fleeing conflict from South Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, Somalia, Ethiopia and Eritrea. These countries have a turbulent history of civil strife, armed conflict and instability. In addition, refugees moved to Uganda more than 40 years ago from Rwanda, and many have become naturalized Ugandans, living in refugee settlements such as Kyangwali, Kyaka and Rwamwanja. Refugees join the plight of nearly one million people internally displaced by wars in Northern Uganda and various natural disasters in the Rwenzori and Elgon regions.
The refugee population in Kampala, an estimated 100,000 people, is mostly made up of those who have moved to the city from the settlements. Having acquired refugee status, they now seek employment opportunities or join family members and friends already settled in Kampala. Many live in both Kampala and the settlements, moving between the two to benefit from the available services and opportunities. That said, many undocumented refugees live within the city.
To curb the spread of Covid-19, Uganda announced a countrywide lockdown in March 2020 and another in June 2021. Though these actions affected everybody in the country, refugees and informal urban poor workers were disproportionately impacted due to their reliance on informal daily wages and their lack of access to national government social safety nets. Refugees within Kampala have fallen into extreme poverty, have had their movement restricted, and saw services focused on their needs cut or reduced due to decreasing government and civil-society organization budgets.
To address these challenges, the Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA) Global Cities Fund project will deliver financial relief and improve the livelihoods of registered and unregistered refugee and urban poor families that have been hit hardest by the Covid-19 pandemic. The project features four main components.
Component One: KCCA will work with refugee-led organizations to identify 350 clients in approximately 85 households and provide them with direct cash assistance in two installments over the course of six months. Clients will include unregistered refugees, migrants with irregular status, and low-income frontline workers. KCCA will especially focus on aiding people who have fallen through the cracks of national government relief programs due to their undocumented migration status, lack of permanent place of abode, and the hospitalized without robust family support systems. KCCA will work with grassroots organizations like Humane Africa Mission (a community-based organization), Uganda Youth Forum the Young African Refugees in Development (YARID, a refugee-led organization), to implement this component of the project. The specific organizations will be identified at the start of the project.
Component Two: For the second component of the project, KCCA will support the economic recovery of refugees through establishment of home-based businesses. Building on KCCA’s experience with its urban farming program to support both livelihoods and urban sustainability, KCCA will focus on supporting 14 clients to establish home-based essential and sustainable businesses such as micro trade and urban agriculture. Clients participating in this component will receive both entrepreneurship training, starter kits and cash grants to (re)establish their businesses.
KCCA will provide all clients who participate in the second component of the project with training in basic financial literacy, seed capital (including equipment, supplies and stock materials), and connections to wider markets through partnerships with online trading platforms to limit exposure to Covid-19 infection in traditional market settings. The project will prioritize support to youth and women, and work closely with the established refugee associations and community-based organizations to ensure transparency in the selection of beneficiaries. As much as possible, clients under component two will be selected from component one clients.
Component Three: To combat the spread of Covid-19 and raise awareness on KCCA services among unregistered refugee communities, KCCA will produce and disseminate Information, Education and Communication (IEC) materials at key distribution points throughout the city. The IEC materials will be available in both local languages and those spoken by refugees and will feature critical information on Covid-19 prevention behavior and relevant social services provided by KCCA, such as access to health facilities and information on how to apply for other KCCA programs. 10,000 Information Education and Communication materials will be produced and translated into four languages for the benefit of close to 50,000 refugees and an equal number of unregistered migrants.
Component Four: For its third component, the project will strengthen KCCA’s capacity to respond to specific refugee and migrant needs by supporting the Kampala for All forum as well as knowledge exchanges with two Ugandan cities, Fort Portal and Mbale, recently designated cities by the national government. The rationale for this city-to-city collaboration is two-fold:
First, Kampala is a city overwhelmed by the numbers of new arrivals, forced and otherwise. Any sustainable solutions for the well-being of migrants and refugees must include solutions within Uganda’s secondary cities so that they may ease the pressure from unplanned population growth Kampala is currently facing.
Second, forced displacement in Uganda adversely affects regional cities near the country’s borders, such as Mbale, Fort Portal, Arua, Gulu and Mbarara. These cities are critical to the initial reception of the migrants and refugees who usually appear in large, overwhelming numbers over a short, concentrated period. This trend requires prior readiness by these receiving cities, a requirement that KCCA will seek to support through joint consultations and knowledge sharing with city leaders in Mbale and Fort Portal.
This project will finance the commencement of knowledge sharing, and collaborative planning approaches for the regional cities to start the process of building a network of responses and support.
Key gatekeepers within KCCA, including Community Development Officers, Probation Officers, city planners, District Education Officers and District Health Officers, will be fully consulted and engaged for programming input. In implementation, the project will work directly with refugee-led organizations and community-based organizations for selection and identification of clients to ensure equity and reach of those most in need of the project’s support. KCCA will work directly with organizations such as the Humane Africa Mission and YARID, two organizations that have existing working relationships with KCCA, to implement many of the project activities.
Visit www.mayorsmigrationcouncil.org/gcf and follow #GlobalCitiesFund on social media for more information on the Global Cities Fund. Contact fund@mayorsmigrationcouncil.org for additional information or press inquiries..