By Nakisanze Segawa and Apophia Agiresaasi
Africa-Press – Zimbabwe. ADJUMANI, UGANDA – Lindiro Jane has fled war twice. The first time was in 2016, when renewed violence in South Sudan pushed her, her husband and their six children across the border into Uganda’s Pagirinya Refugee Resettlement Camp.
At the time, the World Food Programme provided refugees monthly cash assistance of about 31,000 Ugandan shillings per person (US$9). It wasn’t much but kept her family going. She supplemented this money by brewing a local beer, which she sold to other refugees.
But every year, donor money shrank as COVID-19, the war in Ukraine, and other priorities pulled international attention and dollars away from Uganda’s refugee program. By mid-2024, the family’s monthly aid had dropped to just 13,000 shillings per family member, which is about US$3.50, and US$28 in total for the eight-member family. It was too little for her family to survive on.
At the same time, fellow refugees said it was safer to go back home. Even some Ugandan government officials encouraged families to go back home, she says. Lindiro took the chance and went back to Kerepi, eastern equatorial part of South Sudan. For about five months, the gamble paid off. They tilled the land. They planted sorghum and maize. For the first time in years, Lindiro says she felt in control of her life.
But one October morning while at the farm, she heard distant screams followed by the crack of gunshots. Hours later, she returned home to find lifeless bodies of her neighbors scattered across the ground. She knew then that returning home might have been a mistake.
“It was a lie,” says Lindiro, referring to what government officials and other refugees had told her.
Once again, her family fled to Pagirinya, the camp they had left not long before. They left behind their unharvested sorghum and maize.
Then, in January, President Donald Trump cut all US foreign aid and largely dismantled the US Agency for International Development (USAID), a key donor to the refugee response. In 2024, the United States gave Uganda US$11 million, totaling to US$83 million since beginning of fiscal year 2023.
Rations that were already meagre were immediately slashed again. Families that at one point received US$9 per person now had to make do with just US$2 a person a month, and even that may disappear entirely as donor funding to refugees continues to shrink.
Danger at home and hunger in exile
Across East Africa, thousands of refugee families like hers, particularly from South Sudan, the world’s youngest country which has spent much of its short life in a stop-start civil war, are shuttling between danger at home and hunger in exile. Over the years, many have fled into neighboring Uganda, Africa’s largest refugee-hosting nation and home to about 1.8 million refugees, almost half of them from South Sudan.
But international funding for refugees has been declining sharply, and while insecurity in some countries like South Sudan continues, some are trickling back home.
Since South Sudan’s President Salva Kiir and Riek Machar – leader of Sudan’s People Liberation Movement and former vice president – signed a peace deal in 2018, more than 390,000 refugees have returned to South Sudan from Uganda, though numbers are likely higher due to the informal nature of many returns.
Some went home hoping the truce would hold, and many more were forced out due to shrinking support for Uganda’s refugee settlements. The pattern is the same for returnees from neighboring Sudan, which is embroiled in its own civil war. In a March 2024 survey by UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, many cited food rations as the reason for leaving.
Once back in South Sudan, where tribal fighting, a stalled peace plan and other factors are pushing the country to the brink of another war, returnees find insecurity and a near-total lack of services.
Some, like Lindiro, end up making the heartbreaking decision to return to the very camps they once left, only to find them even more fragile than before.
In fact, WFP and the UNHCR, both organizations coordinating refugee support in Uganda and that were mostly funded by USAID, are warning of an even broader collapse.
In 2017, UNHCR operated on a budget of almost US$220 million in Uganda, and by the end of 2023, that money had dropped to US$141 million, even though the number of refugees kept growing, according to a 2024 policy brief by the Egmont Royal Institute for International Relations, an independent, Brussels-based think tank.
This year, the agency secured just 17% of its 2025 budget. Without urgent funding, the agency says, it will be forced to slash core services including shelter, food, clean water, and child protection.
WFP is also experiencing a funding shortfall of about US$50 million for 2025, says Marcus Prior, the acting country director in Uganda. While they don’t plan on withdrawing services, he says they will continue with their prioritizations scheme, focusing only on the most vulnerable refugee population living in Uganda’s 13 settlements.
In fact, this May, the organization has been forced to reduce the number of refugees it supports to 663,000, Prior says. What this means is that almost one million refugees will be cut off from aid.
Already, between March and May 2025, malnutrition among refugees rose to 21.5 percent, well above World Health Organization’s emergency threshold of 15 percent, Prior says
And a UNHRC report released this April shows that from January, nine children under five have died due to malnutrition. Health centers have closed, about 250 health workers have been laid off, and hundreds of early childhood caregivers too. And this is just part of the damage by funding cuts.
If this continues, Prior says “refugees may resort to negative coping strategies.” They might remove their children from school, move to other countries or return home despite dangers. This could create new humanitarian dangers, he says.
Crowded camps and empty coffers
Despite the worsening conditions, the flow of new arrivals hasn’t slowed. Renewed fighting in eastern DRC, fresh flare ups in South Sudan and Sudan’s full-scale civil war between the army and the Rapid Support Forces – which just by itself triggered a sixfold increase in cross-border movements by May 2023 – are sending fresh waves of people into Uganda’s already strained refugee response system.
At the border, transit and reception centers are overflowing. Some are operating at six times their capacity.
In 2025 alone, the country has received about 90,000 new arrivals from Sudan, South Sudan and DRC, Prior says.
Settlements will still take in new arrivals, says Carol Sparks, UNHCR head of external relations, strategic partnerships and communications in Uganda. However, without enough support, the growing pressure could quickly push the situation into a crisis.
Rose Foni, a 40-year-old South Sudanese who tried to resettle at home in May 2024, but was forced back to Pigirinya Camp by renewed fighting in her village is worried about what might happen if Uganda is left all on its own by donors.
This is a possibility, as other donors are also reconsidering aid. The UK, which also provides significant funding to Uganda’s refugee program in February announced that in 2027, it will be reducing its aid spending to just 0.3% of its gross general income.
But Jogo Titus, the regional refugee desk officer at the Office of the Prime Minister in Adjumani district says the government is determined to ensure refugees are self-reliant, instead of depending solely on aid. “These are our brothers and sisters, we can’t let them die in the absence of foreign aid,” he says.
One strategy the government is pursuing is talking with local communities to rent out land to refugees at a subsidized fee so they can farm.
While Uganda’s refugee policy guarantees land, in practice, implementation depends on local negotiations, host community goodwill, and the cost. Disputes between landowners and refugees have flared up before due to reduction in land plots and issues with compensation.
In addition, as resources dwindle, many refugees simply can’t afford to rent it. “It’s very expensive to rent land here,” Lindiro says. Some landlords ask between 100000(US$28)- 150000(US$42) shillings per planting season.
For now, as Lindiro waits and hopes for peace, she supplements her dwindling cash assistance by selling firewood and thatching grass. She no longer brews beer after a doctor warned her the heat from the brewing was bad for her health.
“In this trap, I am left with only one option, to [be] dependent on ratio that keeps on shrinking,” Lindiro says.
Yotam Gidron, a research associate at the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford warns that if cuts continue, even more people will be forced to return home despite the ongoing dangers there.
“As problematic or undesirable as this may sound to donors,” he says, maintaining humanitarian aid is essential for protecting refugees.
Source: NewsDay
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