Awareness

Ugandan Education and Kyangwali Refugee Settlement
by Andrea Samuelson

Located in the Hoima District of Western Uganda, the Kyangwali Refugee Settlement was home to 17,800 Congolese, Sudanese, Rwandan, Kenyan, Burundian and Ethiopian inhabitants in 2004. It is on this settlement that our 15 sponsored Educate! students reside.

Upon arrival, they were each given a package of farming and cooking equipment, tarps, blankets, a plot of land, seeds, and some two to four food rations; hardly enough to build a new life. Refugees in Uganda are also provided free health care, primary education, water, and access to community service workers and income-generating programs.

Based on an integrationist policy of self-sufficiency within recovering communities, refugees are expected to provide for themselves amidst ill-defined property rights which weaken their economic freedoms. The financial restrictions imposed through bureaucratic, isolationist, linguistic and physical limitations have prohibited the upward mobility of refugees in Uganda. Although primary education for registered refugees (and non-refugees) in Uganda is free through 7th grade, secondary education is limited to the more affluent of the settlement population.

Most refugee families living in camps are deprived the income generating opportunities that would enable them to send their children on through secondary school. Those who are able to continue schooling do so in an atmosphere congested with fears of hunger, disease, abduction, rape and robbery.

The inadequate rates of completion for secondary school reflect more than the absence of resources but the suppression of opportunity and potential. The devastating threat of illiteracy is imminent and could result in the extinction of younger generations who are unable to defend themselves through diplomatic channels.

The increasing immunization rates, wage earning potentials, enhanced vocational opportunities and greater overall health, as rendered through schooling, reveal the necessity of education for the sustainable development of any society. Priority must be given to refugee children whose schooling is hindered by violence and whose temporary situation leaves them open to manipulation.

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