The districts of Lamwo and Adjumani host refugees mainly from South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia, Burundi, Eritrea, Rwanda, Ethiopia and Sudan. This is in line with Uganda’s Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework (CRRF), which harnesses a whole-of-society approach in responding and finding solutions to the refugee crisis. The Uganda Host and Refugee Community Empowerment Project (2019-2023) is a joint initiative between the Government of Uganda, the Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) and United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) that seeks to improve the socio-economic empowerment of refugees and host communities and enhance capacities for mainstreaming gender equity and Gender-Based Violence (GBV) prevention. It employs a Humanitarian-Development-Peace (HDP) nexus approach.

Under the project efforts have been put together to strengthen the refugee and host community economic sustainability and resilience through strengthening production value chains, upgrade these value chains and support connections of products to markets, including locally. Community market infrastructure are important part of these actions which seek to benefit both refugees and host community members. This being seen as an important part of the continuum of implementation of livelihoods activities including enterprise development and business/vocational skills training as well as GBV prevention and response interventions to promote equitable and inclusive local economic recovery, which have been undertaken concurrently.

The objective of the project safeguards is to ensure compliance with relevant policies, including UNDP’s Social and Environmental Standards, and to direct the project personnel and stakeholders during the implementation of the project in tackling the social and environmental concerns identified during the design phase.

The draft documents are accessible here for review and comments.

If you have any questions or comments, please email us on communications.ug@undp.org