Key Considerations: Food Assistance Prioritisation in Refugee Settlements in Uganda and its Impacts

This brief provides considerations around the humanitarian and policy implications of the general food and cash assistance (GFA) prioritisation strategy in Uganda’s refugee settlements. In light of ongoing cuts to humanitarian funding, the considerations in this brief are relevant to refugee-hosting countries in and beyond East Africa.

Globally, protracted emergencies and displacement situations are increasingly undergoing severe and chronic underfunding.¹ In the face of ever-shrinking funding, humanitarian settings have recently seen the introduction of ‘prioritisation exercises’. These exercises often involve reductions to food assistance, implemented within pre-existing conditions of high economic vulnerability and based on specific framings and categorisations of this vulnerability. They aim to direct limited humanitarian resources towards those international institutions identify as most ‘in need’.^2,3

This brief outlines the prioritisation strategy in Uganda, a country that currently hosts 1.7 million refugees. The brief shows that the strategy’s implementation, against high baseline levels of malnutrition and household vulnerability, has had wide-ranging consequences, including undermining the viability of Uganda’s much-celebrated self-reliance model.

The brief builds on research conducted in 2024 to examine the processes that inform the prioritisation exercise in Uganda, its effects on food security for refugees and the viability of Uganda’s self-reliance strategy. It draws on data collected through ethnographic methods, interviews and focus group discussions with South Sudanese refugees in Palabek Refugee Settlement and Rhino Camp Refugee Settlement over eight months. It also builds on both authors’ expertise on the Ugandan refugee emergency, discussions with government employees and humanitarian and health workers engaged in the Ugandan refugee response and academic and grey literature.