In August 2017, FAO was asked by the Commissioner for Refugees (Office of the Prime Minister of Uganda) to support the implementation of a socio-economic analysis within the refugees’ settlements and host communities, with the aim of providing a comprehensive assessment of the current state of the refugees’ food security, well-being and resilience. Although refugees in Uganda are given land and mobility rights, their food security remains low, with a high dependency on food aid. The assumption was that by better understanding refugees’ preferences and livelihoods strategies which determine their resilience, it would be possible to unlock the development potential of the land, increase productivity and help them achieve independence and self-reliance.
Uganda currently hosts more than 1.4 million refugees and the relationship with the host population is complex. In this paper, we investigate the effect of the interactions between refugee and host-communities by using a unique dataset and by exploring a broad range of economic outcomes – such as employment opportunities, sources of income, agriculture production, and enterprises. We use the distance between refugee and host communities to measure the degree of interaction. To deal with potential endogeneity issues, we adopt an instrumental variable approach and carry out several robustness tests. We find positive effects on individual participation in paid employment and on household wage income. Discarding the role of assistance, we suggest that these positive effects can be driven by refugees’ economic activities. However, the market creation is localized.
The INFORMED programme, implemented by FAO from 2015 to 2019, was designed to contribute to “increasing the resilience of livelihoods to threats and crises and contributing to the reduction of food insecurity and malnutrition”. The programme’s increased focused on Early Warning for Early Action (EWEA) was very relevant to fill existing gaps with a comparative advantage for FAO in slow onset and food chain crises contexts. Promoting the use of pre-agreed plans and pre-identified anticipatory actions, the project effectively improved risk analysis and decision making, including through the Global Report on Food Crises, and increased access to appropriate financing instruments, while the EWEA country toolkit initial positive spinoffs remain to be built on.Efforts to support resilience measurement and analyses by applying the resilience index measurement and analysis (RIMA) methodology are relevant given the significant investments in resilience programming and the continuing methodological gaps. However, although RIMA provides a basis for creating evidence on resilience investments, and FAO has been an important pioneer in resilience measurement, a wider system supporting resilience analysis is needed, based on a range of methodologies, responding to the information needs of decision-makers. Also, RIMA baseline lacks sufficient detail to allow articulating the feasibility of possible response options and have a practical impact on planning decisions; it has not demonstrated its added value over pre-existing food security, nutrition and risk indicators to help target interventions, and is not well adapted as an impact evaluation tool.Assessing INFORMED results against its intention to support knowledge production and sharing, to promote the replication of good practices and circular learning, the evaluation questioned the choice of creating a new knowledge management platform versus adopting a collaborative approach building on similar initiatives’ strengths. Poor strategic choices represented a fundamental constraint to reach intended objectives, such as, an insufficient understanding of users explaining the difficulty to trace the uptake and use of knowledge products. Nevertheless, the evaluation recognized the progressive investments in knowledge management and sizeable accomplishments of a relatively small team.The evaluation suggests strengthening capacities for the production and dissemination of forecast, scenario-based early warning as a basis for early action; developing a corporate strategy for partnering to strengthen early warning system capacities at various levels; promoting the use of a toolkit of approaches and investing in a knowledge management function dedicated to capturing and disseminating lessons on the effectiveness of EWEA and resilience interventions.
Social protection transfers are the most widespread measures adopted to stabilize refugee households’ livelihoods and alleviate their food insecurity. This paper contributes to the literature on the effectiveness of different types of support on livelihoods and productivity outcomes of one of the largest refugee populations in Africa. Taking advantage of a unique panel dataset representative of the largest part of the 1.4 million people hosted in the Uganda refugees’ settlements, this paper investigates how different social protection interventions (cash and food) are effective in alleviating food insecurity and in contributing to beneficiaries’ self-reliance. The results show that the effectiveness of transfers depends on beneficiaries’ characteristics, on context specificity, and on the outcome assessed.
Food systems are at a critical juncture—they are evolving quickly to meet growing and changing demand but are not serving everyone’s needs. Building more inclusive food systems can bring a wide range of economic and development benefits to all people, especially the poor and disadvantaged. IFPRI’s 2020 Global Food Policy Report examines the policies and investments and the growing range of tools and technologies that can promote inclusion. Chapters examine the imperative of inclusion, challenges faced by smallholders, youth, women, and conflict-affected people, and the opportunities offered by expanding agrifood value chains and national food system transformations. Critical questions addressed include: How can inclusive food systems help break the intergenerational cycle of poverty and malnutrition? \What can be done to strengthen the midstream of food value chains to improve rural access to jobs, markets, and services? Will Africa’s food systems generate sufficient jobs for the growing youth population? How can women be empowered within food system processes, from household decisions to policymaking? Can refugees and other conflict-affected people be integrated into food systems to help them rebuild their lives? How can national food system transformations contribute to greater dietary diversity, food safety, and food quality for all? Regional sections look at how inclusion can be improved around the world in 2020 and beyond. The report also presents interesting trends revealed by IFPRI’s food policy indicators and datasets.
Uganda is home to 1.5 million refugees from DRC, Burundi, South Sudan and other countries. The Uganda political framework is one of the most progressive and inclusive toward refugees. Only a fraction of the refugees is likely to go back to their home countries. This book assesses Uganda’s progressive refugee policy with reference to how it functioned in the era of COVID-19 using a unique panel data collected between 2017 and 2021. The Uganda Refugee Policy (2006) and the Refugee Regulations (2010) grant refugees wide-ranging rights that include allocating land for agriculture purposes, freedom of movement, and the right to seek employment. However, the magnitude and the speed of influx of refugees in recent years have posed critical challenges to the sustainability of these progressive policies. On top of this, unpredictable and unprecedented crises have emerged, such as COVID-19 and the Ukraine war, that have threatened food security and the resilience of livelihoods, value chains and food systems. The chapters in this book assess Uganda’s progressive refugee policy with reference to how it functioned in the era of COVID-19. They focus on the following three main areas: (i) the economic relationship and coexistence between host and refugees’ communities; (ii) the success and sustainability of the current model of assistance; and (iii) the response to COVID-19 on communities’ welfare and long-term prospects. Addressing these issues is possible due to a unique panel dataset of thirteen refugee settlements and neighbouring host communities specifically collected for these purposes. Investigating the economic consequences of the integration between host and refugees’ communities and offering new evidence with specific reference to Uganda, this book will be a key resource for scholars, researchers and practitioners of development studies, African studies, economics, and sociology. It was originally published as a special issue of The Journal of Development Studies.
An emerging literature shows how the mass arrival of refugees induces both short- and long-term consequences to hosting countries. The main contribution of this paper is to conduct a selective review of this literature from a food-security and resilience perspective. First, the paper identifies a number of direct and indirect food-security consequences of hosting refugees. It provides a conceptual framework for discussing these various channels through which refugee inflows influence food security in the hosting countries. Second, the literature review finds that the impact of large-scale influxes of refugees on host communities and on their food security is unequally distributed among the local population.
This comprehensive report looks at the threats facing agriculture and rural livelihoods, from food crises and transboundary animal diseases to conflicts and natural disasters. It presents an in-depth analysis of impacts on fisheries, aquaculture and forestry, and addresses post-disaster management strategies.
Updates for many countries have made it possible to estimate hunger in the world with greater accuracy this year. In particular, newly accessible data enabled the revision of the entire series of undernourishment estimates for China back to 2000, resulting in a substantial downward shift of the series of the number of undernourished in the world. Nevertheless, the revision confirms the trend reported in past editions: the number of people affected by hunger globally has been slowly on the rise since 2014. The report also shows that the burden of malnutrition in all its forms continues to be a challenge. There has been some progress for child stunting, low birthweight and exclusive breastfeeding, but at a pace that is still too slow. Childhood overweight is not improving and adult obesity is on the rise in all regions. The report complements the usual assessment of food security and nutrition with projections of what the world may look like in 2030, if trends of the last decade continue. Projections show that the world is not on track to achieve Zero Hunger by 2030 and, despite some progress, most indicators are also not on track to meet global nutrition targets. The food security and nutritional status of the most vulnerable population groups is likely to deteriorate further due to the health and socio economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. The report puts a spotlight on diet quality as a critical link between food security and nutrition. Meeting SDG 2 targets will only be possible if people have enough food to eat and if what they are eating is nutritious and affordable. The report also introduces new analysis of the cost and affordability of healthy diets around the world, by region and in different development contexts. It presents valuations of the health and climate-change costs associated with current food consumption patterns, as well as the potential cost savings if food consumption patterns were to shift towards healthy diets that include sustainability considerations. The report then concludes with a discussion of the policies and strategies to transform food systems to ensure affordable healthy diets, as part of the required efforts to end both hunger and all forms of malnutrition.
