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Funding gaps deny South Sudanese children in Uganda camps an education

Saturday June 24 2017
Ss refugees

South Sudanese flee their country for Uganda. Kampala can no longer bear the refugee burden due to lack of funding. PHOTO FILE | AFP

By RAYMOND TAMALE

Abraham Deng, 16, is a South Sudanese refugee who fled his country alone in 2015 when the war – which has now gone on for three and half years – claimed the life of his father, and an explosive blew off his mother’s legs.

Deng is currently in Primary Six in a school in the Nyumanzi camp, living with a friend he met in the camp, and juggling school and menial jobs.
He weeds people’s gardens to raise his Ush9,000 ($2.48) annual school fees, charging Ush500 ($0.13) per garden. To raise the entire fees, he would have to weed at least 18 gardens.
Nyumanzi Primary School is the only one in the camp, with an enrolment of 1,583 and only nine classrooms, each accommodating over 300 pupils. 

Bul Garang, the school headteacher, says there are 478 pupils in Primary One alone, and the number keeps rising as more refugees come in.

“One teacher teaches over 400 pupils and more than 100 students use one textbook,” says Garang.

READ: Alarming rise in S.Sudan children fleeing to Uganda

Social and health needs
Officials at the Uganda country office of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) recently toured the Pigirinya, Nyumanzi and Mungula refugee camps, all in the Adjumani district in the West Nile region of northern Uganda, to assess the infrastructure, social and health needs of the asylum seekers.

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Together with Office of the Prime Minister and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, UNFPA hopes to use this assessment to determine the funding and needs of asylum seekers — especially children, who make up 58 per cent of the refugees in the country.

READ: Rights body faults donors for neglecting refugees

More than 40,000 new arrivals from South Sudan are recorded each month since July 2016, with the biggest number aged below 18, according to UNFPA.

Uganda is experiencing the fastest growing refugee crisis in world, and is now hosting more 1.2 million refugees, who have put immense pressure on the few services in the settlement camps.

Need for funding
Titus Jogo, the refugee desk officer in the Office of the Prime Minister stationed in Adjumani, said the generation of South Sudanese children who need to get an education is high, emphasising the need for funding to make this possible.

READ: Uganda to raise $8b for growing refugee numbers

According to UNHCR, of the $1.4 billion requested for the South Sudanese refugees to the end of 2017, only $649 million has been received.

About $43 million was meant for humanitarian organisations in South Sudan while $32 million was to help the refugees in Uganda and a further $8.6 million to fund urgent and lifesaving activities in South Sudan.

READ: EU offers $95m to fund Uganda's refugee response

State and host community resources like schools, health and security services, as well as the environment are overstretched. Adjumani alone hosts 224,318 refugees.

For young refugees like Deng, whose ambition is to become a medical doctor and then a soldier, the route to achieving this depends on getting better education and livelihood, which at the present state of affairs at the refugee camps in Adjumani cannot be guaranteed.

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