Twenty years into Uganda’s celebrated refugee policy, the border is still open, but the land, the funding, and now the legal protection that used to come with crossing it are all running out. By: Olivier BAKOMEZI,
Director of the Refugees Parliamentarians for Peace-RPP
and Chairman of the Congolese Urban Refugee Community.
Date: 03 July 2026, Kampala, Uganda
Scale
A crisis measured in decades, not headlines
Uganda is not new to hosting refugees, and that is precisely the problem the world keeps missing. This is not an emergency response. It is a two-decade-old settlement system now absorbing the compounded weight of Sudan, South Sudan, and eastern Congo all at once.
Uganda’s refugee population has grown roughly fourteen-fold since the country’s landmark Refugees Act was enacted in 2006, when the caseload stood near 140,000. By April 2026, the country was hosting more than two million refugees and asylum seekers, making it the largest refugee-hosting nation on the African continent and one of the largest in the world, alongside Colombia, Germany, Turkey, Iran, Chad, and Pakistan.
New arrivals have not stopped. Sudan’s war, which intensified in 2023, pushed more than 65,500 Sudanese into Uganda by the end of 2024 alone, prompting the government to extend group-based, prima facie recognition to that population. Meanwhile, intercommunal violence in South Sudan and renewed fighting in eastern DRC continue to send people across the border every month, with protracted displacement layered on top of protracted refugees.
The Model
A policy the world held up as the answer
Uganda’s approach was, for a long time, genuinely exceptional. The Refugees Act of 2006 and its 2010 regulations gave refugees the right to work, to move freely, and to farm a plot of land rather than depend indefinitely on rations behind a fence. Donors and UN agencies pointed to it as a template the World Bank built dedicated financing around it, and Uganda’s “self-reliance model” became a reference point for durable solutions everywhere.
The model rested on three assumptions: that Uganda would keep providing land, that donors would keep funding the response, and that the two together would let refugees become self-sufficient. All three are now under strain at once.
There is real evidence that the model worked in places, such as refugee-run businesses, mixed markets with host communities, and refugee participation in shaping Uganda’s national climate adaptation plan. But even in better-funded years, independent household surveys found that most refugee families survived on less than two dollars a day, and that figure worsened sharply whenever food assistance was reduced. Self-reliance, in other words, has always been more aspiration than achieved fact and the conditions required to close that gap have not materialized.
Impact: Land
The arithmetic of a shrinking plot
The clearest evidence of protraction isn’t a statistic; it’s a fence line. Uganda’s self-reliance model was built on giving each refugee household roughly one to two acres, enough to farm and build a home. Two decades of sustained arrivals have made that standard almost impossible to meet.
Signature exhibit land allocated per household, Nakivale settlement
policy standard (1–2 acres) typical plot, 2026 (30×30m) documented low, 2026 (20×20m)
At Nakivale, meeting the settlement’s own land standard for every household would require roughly 50 additional square kilometres beyond its existing 185 square kilometres of land that does not exist. Current allocations meet under 5% of that standard; field research in February 2026 documented plots as small as 20 by 20 metres.
The squeeze is sharpest in older, land-locked settlements like Nakivale, but the pattern, arrivals outpacing available land, repeats across the settlement system, from Bidibidi in the north to Kyaka II in the west.
Impact: Funding
When the money runs out mid-program
If land defines the long-term ceiling on self-reliance, funding defines whether people eat this month. Since 2022, demand for humanitarian assistance in Uganda’s settlements has climbed steadily while donor funding has declined, and 2025 and 2026 have brought the sharpest cuts yet.
WFP food assistance reach1.6m → 663k people
IRC 2026 health funding secured6% of requirement
The World Food Program has cut both the number of refugees it reaches and the size of individual rations, shrinking coverage from 1.6 million people in early 2025 to roughly 663,000 by 2026. Food insecurity among refugees has more than tripled in a single year. The International Rescue Committee, warning that Uganda’s health system for refugees is approaching collapse, has already closed services across eleven settlements, affecting more than 735,000 people across Bidibidi, Imvepi, Rhino Camp, Palabek, and Kiryandongo after securing only a fraction of what 2026 requires.
The knock-on effects reach further than clinics and food queues. Citing the collapse of UNHCR’s operational funding for Uganda from roughly $240 million to $100 million, Minister for Relief, Disaster Preparedness and Refugees Hillary Onek confirmed that Uganda suspended group-based refugee status determination for several nationalities in December 2025, before lifting prima facie recognition altogether for new arrivals in early 2026. South Sudanese and Congolese nationals had for years been the two largest groups automatically granted status on arrival, so the practical effect falls heavily on new arrivals from the DRC, now funneled into a slower, individual determination process at the exact moment fighting in the eastern DRC continues to displace civilians, despite the peace framework Kinshasa and Kigali signed in 2025. Clashes between M23, Congolese forces, and allied militias were still being reported in North and South Kivu as of mid-2026. Every Congolese family arriving in Uganda today does so into a system with less protection than the one their predecessors found, at the moment the war driving them from home has not stopped.
Impact: People
What the numbers mean at kitchen-table scale
Behind each percentage point of a funding cut is a household making a trade-off that shouldn’t have to be made: a smaller meal, a missed clinic visit, a child pulled from school to help earn income. Refugee families interviewed in Uganda’s settlements describe rationing what little food assistance remains and asking, plainly, for the support that once let them plan more than a week ahead.
- Malnutrition is rising in settlements that had, until recently, shown real gains in child nutrition.
- Livelihood programs are oversubscribed. Business-training and self-reliance initiatives designed to move families off aid can no longer meet demand once the aid itself is cut, leaving newly vulnerable households locked out.
- New Congolese arrivals face a harder door than the one their predecessors walked through. With prima facie recognition eliminated, individual status determination now stands between a family fleeing eastern DRC and legal protection, while the conflict that displaced them is still active.
- Host communities feel the pressure too. Settlements sit in areas already exposed to flooding and extreme heat, and competition over land, water, and firewood between refugees and their Ugandan neighbors is intensifying as both climate stress and population density rise.
- Urban refugees face a parallel, less visible strain. More than 157,000 refugees and asylum seekers live in Kampala outside the settlement system, often in crowded housing, without the language, credentials, or documentation to access formal work.
Perspectives
What a way forward could look like
None of this means Uganda’s model has failed as an idea, only that it was never designed to run on humanitarian funding alone for twenty straight years. The credible paths forward being discussed by government, UN agencies, and development partners share a common thread: stop treating this as a temporary emergency and start financing it like the multi-decade responsibility it actually is.
Fold services into national systems
Programs like Uganda’s Intergovernmental Fiscal Transfers mechanism are gradually integrating refugee-serving schools and clinics into the national health and education budget, rather than running them as a permanent parallel system funded on a project-by-project basis.
Bring in development finance, not just aid
The World Bank’s dedicated refugee financing window and bilateral programs, including a new UK-funded initiative worth up to £20 million over two and a half years, are explicitly designed to build long-term resilience and self-reliance alongside, not instead of, continued humanitarian support.
Expand third-country pathways honestly
Uganda has roughly 174,000 refugees identified by UNHCR as needing resettlement to a third country in 2026, people whose safety, health, or protection needs cannot realistically be met by staying, whatever land or funding reforms follow. Resettlement deserves a place in this conversation, but only if it’s discussed at its true scale: the global 2026 target is 120,000 places against 2.5 million people identified as needing them worldwide, and historically fewer than 5% of those in need are ever resettled through UNHCR in a given year. Quotas have also been falling toward twenty-year lows just as needs are rising. Resettlement will never absorb Uganda’s protracted caseload, but as a targeted protection tool for the most vulnerable cases, alongside complementary pathways like labor mobility, education visas, and family reunification, it remains a piece that resettlement states keep underfunding relative to their own commitments.
Keep refugees at the table
Refugee-led organizations in Uganda have already shaped the country’s national climate adaptation plan and its positions in global climate negotiations, a rare example of displaced people negotiating policy rather than only receiving it. Protecting that seat at the table matters as much as protecting the budget line.
Share the responsibility globally
UNHCR has been explicit that Uganda cannot be left to manage a population the size of a mid-sized country on a shrinking share of global humanitarian funding. The agency’s own global target of halving by 2035 the number of refugees in protracted displacement who cannot meet their basic needs without external support will not be met in Uganda without donors returning to the table.
Call to Action
What Uganda’s refugee response needs now
“Protracted” is not a neutral word. It describes a generation of children born in a settlement who have never seen the country listed on their registration papers, and it describes a policy that the international community praised, then chronically under-funded. Uganda has kept its doors open for two decades. The question this dossier is written to press is simple: who is still funding what happens on the other side of that door?
- Donor governments should restore multi-year, predictable funding to Uganda’s refugee response, not emergency top-ups after clinics have already closed and rations have already been cut.
- UNHCR and resettlement states should expand resettlement quotas and complementary pathways in line with actual need, rather than allowing quotas to keep falling as displacement rises.
- The Government of Uganda and development partners should accelerate the integration of refugee-serving health and education services into national systems, and address the land shortfall directly rather than absorbing it silently into ever-smaller household plots.
- Every actor in this response should keep refugee-led organizations at the table where decisions about land, services, and climate adaptation are made, not as beneficiaries consulted after the fact, but as partners shaping the response.
Uganda did not create this crisis, and it should not be left to manage it alone. Responsibility-sharing is not charity; it is the obligation the international community accepted when it called Uganda’s policy a model worth replicating.
Sources & further reading
- UNHCR Uganda Operational Data Portal & UNHCR Global Trends Report, 2026
- UNHCR, Projected Global Resettlement Needs (PGRN) 2026
- Office of the Prime Minister, Uganda Refugee Management Portal
- World Food Program, “Funding shortfalls push Uganda’s refugees deeper into hunger,” 2026
- International Rescue Committee, press statement on Uganda health funding cuts, January 2026
- Refugees International, “Uganda’s Generous Open-door Refugee Policy is Breaking Down” and “From Promise to Practice,” 2026
- Human Rights Watch, World Report 2026: Democratic Republic of Congo chapter
- International Crisis Group, “The M23 Offensive: Elusive Peace in the Great Lakes,” 2026
- World Bank Group, “Transforming Uganda’s Refugee Response: Accelerated Self-Reliance,” 2026.
About the author
Olivier MAPEMA BAKOMEZI is a human rights lawyer and humanitarian protection specialist working across the Great Lakes region, with experience in refugee protection, community organizing, and rights-based advocacy in displacement contexts. He writes and works between French and English, based in Kampala, Uganda.