EU funding, UNHCR disconnect and the limits of Uganda’s refugee response. In: Krause, U. & Fröhlich, C. (eds.) externalizing alysum: a compendium of scientific knowledge

Abstract

Uganda is today Africa’s topmost refugee-hosting country, with over 1.5 million refugees mostly settled across the country’s thirteen refugee settlements. The country’s settlement-based refugee hosting model has won widespread acclaim undergirded by substantive external funding, not least from European Union (EU) donor countries. Basing on an ethnographic fieldwork involving refugees who had sought or are seeking asylum in Uganda’s urban spaces, this paper demonstrates how EU funding targets, coupled with UNHCR policy implementation choices utterly disconnected from existing realities-on-ground, have shaped Uganda’s settlement-based refugee response to its limits. The paper concludes that, if going unchecked, EU funding and UNHCR implementation would accordingly treat refugees seeking asylum in Uganda – and by extension across the global South – not as ‘effective persons of concern’ but rather as ‘persons to whom it may concern’ as the continent and the world at large further urbanise amid growing ecological upset.