It was rainy season and Noel Yole had a lot of electronics on his head.
The eighteen-year-old picked his way over muddy terrain balancing two monitors, two laptops, one computer, two sets of speakers, and a handful of hard drives in a dilapidated cardboard box wrapped in tarpaulin, all balanced precariously on his crown. Then the gunfire started again.
He cursed as he ran and the mud gave way. The box slipped off his head and he cringed at the crack of broken electronics.
South Sudan’s spiraling civil war, engulfing towns like dominos, had hit Yole’s hometown of Yei. He was walking at least 200 miles to Uganda which he heard was the nearest safe place — and also the best place for a refugee to end up.
He scooped up his computers and kept running, sure the gunfire was coming from government troops who had begun targeting civilians. Like many refugees, Yole was carrying the means to support himself in his new home. Unlike most countries that host refugees, Uganda would actually give him a chance at a job, a piece of land, a real life.
Yole is one of the 700,000 South Sudanese refugees now living in Uganda, more than the population of Boston. Well over half arrived after July 2016, surpassing the 362,376 refugees and migrants who fled to all of Europe in 2016.
As growing isolationism fuels hostility toward refugees in the rest of the world, Uganda is taking a different tack: it is shouldering one of the fastest-growing refugee crises by maintaining one of the most liberal refugee policies in the world.
“This is really an example for the world,” said Nasir Abel Fernandes, a Senior Emergency Coordinator for UNHCR in Uganda.
Through its 2006 Refugee Act, Uganda gives refugees the right to work and travel freely, access Ugandan social services, a plot of land to live on, and a plot of land to farm.
Even as arrivals average 2,500 a day, according to Fernandes, Uganda has not wavered in its commitment to accept every refugee that arrives, regardless of nationality, ethnicity, or religion.
Perhaps more remarkably, the biggest champions of these polices are Ugandans themselves. “Being a refugee isn’t an easy life, so we welcome them in this country,” said Butigar Razak, 40, a shopkeeper in Northern Uganda. “They deserve rights, the same as us.”
Razak’s sentiment isn’t unusual in Uganda.
“Ugandans, through all of this, have treated refugees as brothers and sisters who are deserving of protection and a safe place for their children and a way to support themselves,” said Kelly T. Clements, United Nations Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees.
This attitude isn’t happenstance; Uganda is a vanguard in its widespread acceptance of the theory that, given the right circumstances, refugees are good for an economy. And that when refugees contribute to an economy, citizens see them as a benefit, not a drain.
“Increasing empirical evidence has shown that it makes good business sense,” said Clements of Uganda’s refugee policy.
Globally, countries are ignoring this evidence. American President Donald Trump’s attempts at a refugee ban still loom. Neighboring Kenya continues to pull a bait and switch on its threats to shutter Dadaab, the largest refugee camp in the world. South Africa is experiencing a dramatic spike in xenophobic attacks.
All of this just makes the commitment of this small and relatively poor East African country to refugees more radical.
The cracked monitor sat in the middle of Yole’s desk in northern Uganda, the jagged slice obscuring half the screen. It was a reminder of his arduous journey from South Sudan, and the war he escaped.
It was late January and Yole was fiddling with a portable speaker using tools he stores in a lunch box and a soldering iron made from a battery and spare wires.
Yole lives in Bidi Bidi now, the largest of Uganda’s many refugee settlements. Just last year it was dry, unpopulated scrubland. Today it’s the second-largest refugee hosting site in the world.
Uganda’s settlements — not camps — draw a sharp division from the model followed in many places around the world, where refugees live isolated from the rest of the population and unable to leave.
Bidi Bidi is a sprawling settlement and refugee homes, usually white tarpaulin tents or mud huts, are nestled in between Ugandan villages. Ugandans and refugees mingle in nearby towns, refugees use Ugandan social services, and Ugandans use the new boreholes built for refugees.
When Yole arrived in September, he unpacked his cardboard box and opened an electronics repair shop. Electronics make sense to him and he has a knack for disassembling their corpses and giving them a second shot at life. “Its just my natural…” Yole paused, gesturing to his brain and laughing.
A dozen dusty but repaired Nokias sat on his desk, lifelines to families still in South Sudan.
A Ugandan friend of his operates a hair salon that moonlights as a foreign exchange market in Bidi Bidi. It was his idea for Yole to annex the electronics repair shop.
“He’s my friend, we figured we could help each other,” Yole said, shrugging like it was no big deal. “Now we both bring each other business.”
Yole exemplifies the economic potential of refugees and the close ties between Ugandans and refugees. His shop is in one of Bidi Bidi’s economic zones: tangled puzzles of structures where you can find everything from grocery stores to movie theaters, all sprung from nothing since Bidi Bidi opened in August. The shops are fairly equally divided between Ugandans and South Sudanese and there’s a widespread understanding that there is enough business for everyone. 272,000 new customers arrived in four months, after all.
The evidence that Uganda’s refugee policy is working is compelling: a 2014 Oxford University study found that just 1% of refugees living in rural Ugandan settlements depended entirely on humanitarian assistance. Almost half of Rwandans, Congolese, and South Sudanese in rural settlements make their living by farming the plots of land given to them. The rest of refugees own small businesses, such as restaurants or tailors, and trade between the settlements and the rest of the country.
“There’s an economic benefit to refugees being able to fend for themselves,” said Clements. “It makes such a difference to host communities when refugees aren’t just in a position of receiving aid but are able to provide for themselves and contribute to the community in an economic sense and in a cultural sense.”
Uganda has a longstanding relationship with refugee hosting: since independence in 1962 Uganda has hosted an average of 161,000 refugees a year, most of them Congolese, South Sudanese, Rwandan, Burundian, and Somali. But the magnitude of today’s crisis is unprecedented and will test Uganda’s generous policy.
For now though, most Northern Ugandans are still quick to point out the economic potential of a refugee crisis.
“I’m also benefitting,” said Mafu Ratib, 39, a restaurant owner who moved back to Yumbe, the nearest town to Bidi Bidi, when the crisis started to cater to the influx of aid workers.
“It has changed business, people are getting work, people are buying things,” said Mwanga Kenyi, 43, who owned one business in Yumbe that sold clothes and sodas before the crisis started and now owns three, including a restaurant and a small movie theater in Bidi Bidi which he employs refugees to run.
Sixty percent of refugees in Uganda are self-employed, 39% were employed by others, and only 1% were unemployed, according to a 2015 Oxford University study. In the capital city Kampala, 21% of refugees generate employment through their businesses.
Amongst many Ugandans, the belief is widespread that when a refugee comes knocking, the only reasonable thing to do is open the door.
“You can’t mistreat such people, it looks bad,” said Ratib. “If it wasn’t because of a crisis, they wouldn’t come to stay here. If you torture that person, you’re adding problems.”
Attitudes like Ratib’s are common, even in Ugandan villages whose backyards are quite literally filled with white UNHCR tents housing South Sudanese refugees.
A study by UNHCR, The World Bank, and the Ugandan government found that “a commendable level of peaceful coexistence is evident between refugees and host communities in all of the settlements.”
“War can send you anywhere, so when someone comes to your country you have to treat them well,” said Kenyi. “You never know when you might become a refugee.”
Given Uganda’s own poverty (a third of Ugandans live on less than two dollars a day) this warmth is remarkable. But Ugandans are also uniquely placed to be so welcoming.
Uganda experienced its own civil war, which only concluded about a decade ago. Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army cleaved Northern Uganda, sending well over a million fleeing elsewhere, including to South Sudan when it was still part of Sudan. Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni was a refugee in Tanzania and both Ratib and Kenyi fled to South Sudan with their families when they were children.
Arbitrary colonial lines also mean that there is ethnic and linguistic overlap between Ugandans and South Sudanese; even absent the civil war, Ugandans cross into South Sudan to tend their crops, while South Sudanese cross over to attend school.
Uganda has received significant windfalls of foreign aid to assist with the crisis. The United States alone gave $40 million last year, tripling its food aid to Uganda. Uganda and South Sudan also have longstanding political ties, partially rooted in Ugandan interest in South Sudanese oil.
And Ugandan policy also plays a huge role in smoothing relations between hosts and refugees.
Uganda stipulates that 30% of all aid that goes to refugees must benefit the local community — and that all facilities built for refugees, such as schools and boreholes, must be open to Ugandans as well. “These days, you find all people are busy working and we’re also benefitting from the development, such as schools and roads,” said Asibuku Zubair, a Ugandan who runs a small kiosk next to Yole’s electronics shop where packets of laundry detergent and tea leaves are strung from the ceiling like necklaces. His four children now attend a school built for refugees.
“You have to focus on projects that impact everybody, not just refugees,” said Deborah Mulumba, who researches refugees at Uganda’s Makerere University.
That is the exact idea behind Refugee and Host Population Empowerment, a UNHCR and World Bank project piloted in Uganda. It integrates the development needs of the community with the needs of the refugees, as part of a nascent global recognition that, especially as conflicts last longer, refugees and hosts can and must mutually benefit.
“When you don’t just have aid going towards just one part of the population but going toward the community as a whole, [you have] a much more balanced situation where it looks like the hosts aren’t just giving, they’re receiving,” said Clements.
As Uganda’s refugee population continues to swell, signs of straining relations are still rare but they do exist.
“The more people who come, the more resources that are being strained, there are some members of the community who are saying let these people pack their bags and go,” said Mufa Said, a farmer in Yumbe who is struggling to find work in the crisis.
Of course, there’s a huge difference between surviving and thriving. While Uganda’s refugee policy offers the former, the latter is still often out of reach.
“Sometimes the praise of this policy is overplayed,” said David Kigozi, the Program Manager of the Great Lakes region at the International Refugee Rights Initiative. “Its a very good policy, but that does not mean that the lives of refugees are rosy.”
Uganda’s hospitals are overstretched and its schools are under-resourced already.
With almost two-thirds of Ugandan youth unemployed, South Sudanese refugees — particularly those with low education levels and limited English — will struggle to find jobs, even though they’re allowed to have them.
There are also concerns that if the scale of the crisis continues as expected, Uganda’s generous policy will buckle. UNHCR is already struggling with funding, only reaching 36% of what it needed for the crisis for last year. This has left UNHCR focused solely on life-saving activities, leaving health care facilities drastically under-resourced and food rations cut in half.
“I don’t think the government expected the influx to be so big,” said Kigozi. “The numbers are just staggering and the facilities have been stretched. If it continues like this I don’t know if that can be sustained.”
One thing is certain: Uganda isn’t likely to see a slowdown of incoming refugees anytime soon. Earlier this week, the United Nations declared a famine in parts of South Sudan, caused by the war and exacerbated by climate change, sure to add to the tens of thousands of lives South Sudan’s three year long civil has already claimed. If UNHCR projections are correct, 2017 will see the number of South Sudanese refugees in Uganda cross over into one million.
Despite the pressures, Uganda isn’t yet showing any signs of reneging on its policies. And while resources will almost certainly be stretched to a breaking point, refugees in Uganda have one thing going for them: an entrenched belief that treating refugees well is just the decent thing to do.
This story was written as part of Uncovering Security, a media skills development program run by the Thomson Reuters Foundation, Stanley Foundation and Gerda Henkel Stiftung.
