‘Some people rather die of a gunshot than of hunger’: how refugees in Northern Uganda navigate targeted and reduced food assistance
Speaker: Roos Derrix
What does the label ‘refugee’ mean and what rights and duties are connected to it in different times and places? These two questions have inspired a wealth of literature in the last 40 years. This presentation aims to contribute to this long standing debate by looking into the latest development of humanitarian assistance in protracted displacement. In Uganda, hosting almost 1.7 million refugees, humanitarian funding has decreased over the last years. This has pushed UNHCR and WFP to implement a prioritisation policy whereby refugees are categorised based on household-level vulnerability. This criterion defines which households are still eligible for food assistance. One year after the implementation of the prioritisation policy, this paper answers the question ‘how do refugees navigate institutional categorisation?’ by analysing reactions from refugees in Adjumani district, Northern Uganda, humanitarian workers and Ugandan government officials. By creating different categories, the humanitarian sector provides an incentive for refugees to be included in the ‘most vulnerable’ category in order to access food assistance. Some refugees not only strategically deploy a dependency narrative in interaction with the aid system but also use food reductions and categorisation to justify circular movement towards South Sudan, potentially endangering their lives. Overall, refugees express a feeling of abandonment by the aid sector since they equate their refugee status to a right to (in-kind) food assistance. Therefore, there seems to be a counterintuitive consequence of the prioritisation policy; that has the ultimate goal of making people self-reliant.