Rebuilding Communities in a Refugee Settlement: A casebook from Uganda

Overview

This book gives a critical account of a complex and ambitious refugee-settlement programme in support of 55,000 refugees who fled in 1993 from armed conflict in south Sudan into a remote and insecure region of north-west Uganda. In helping refugees to rebuild self-reliant, sustainable communities, Oxfam’s vision was to treat them “as people with their own capacities and dignity”. This book relates how structures were established to ensure the representation of all groups, particularly the most vulnerable. It considers the questions of integration with the local host population; site-suitability and the impact of refugee settlements on their physical environment; the problems of “donor fatigue”; and the internal stresses created when a disaster-relief operation evolves into a community-development programme in a still-turbulent context.