Uganda is at the centre of current debate on urban refugees. The country’s Refugees Act 2006, which establishes refugees’ rights to live, work and own land in urban areas, has been hailed as exemplary and a global model for humanitarian responses. However, new evidence on refugee livelihoods in Kampala suggests that the rights to work and move freely, and without fear, are often unmet in urban areas. In the absence of financial assistance, urban refugees often struggle to find gainful employment and report frequent cases of discrimination by both the Ugandan state and the public. This briefing outlines the barriers to upholding the rights of urban refugees in Uganda, and recommends ways in which these may be overcome.
Uganda currently hosts close to 1.3 million refugees — the third largest refugee population in the world. A significant proportion of this population live in the country’s urban areas, where they lack the access to financial assistance afforded to their rural counterparts (see Box 1). Kampala’s annual growth rate of three per cent can partly be attributed to the arrival of displaced populations.2 The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) estimates that Kampala is home to 94,958 refugees and asylum seekers — a figure that increased by nearly 25 per cent between February 2016 and May 2017 (see Table 1). The two largest refugee populations in the capital are from the Democratic Republic of Congo and Somalia, the former fleeing the First and Second Congo Wars (1996–97 and 1998–2003, respectively) and various phases of the Kivu conflict (2004–present) and the latter from reverberations of the Somali Civil War (1991–present).
Urban refugees differ from host citizens in two important ways. First, most refugees have faced violent conflict, human rights abuses and/or long and arduous journeys — experiences that expose them to forms of physical and mental stress that are often not well understood by local people and host governments. Secondly, refugees face additional barriers when seeking to access work — for example, language and political discrimination — that can force them to engage in activities with higher degrees of social and economic risk, such as street vending and waste picking.
