Uganda
The Government of Uganda and the international community are increasingly proactive in preparing households for weather and climate shocks.
Overview
Flooding, drought, and other climate shocks pose major challenges for households in Uganda. The Government of Uganda has taken a much more proactive role in leading the effort to increase resilience in recent years, and international donors are increasing harmonization of their resilience activities and increasingly testing what works and what doesn’t work.
Complex Risk Environment
Uganda is vulnerable to flooding, drought, and increasing rainfall variability and rising temperatures. These vulnerabilities are exacerbated by environmental degradation, underdeveloped irrigation systems, and lack of disaster preparedness at the community level. Northern Uganda is especially affected by weather shocks, such as the 2016 El Niño event that caused a failure of rainfall and led to a devastating drought.
Resilience Approach
The Government of Uganda has taken steps recently to be more proactive about disaster preparedness and climate resilience. In 2008, it established the Climate Change Department within the Ministry of Water and Environment, and in 2015, it scaled up its social safety net for poor and vulnerable households by introducing a disaster risk finance component to one of its largest resilience projects. The Office of the Prime Minister releases a Monthly National Integrated Multi-Hazard Early Warning Bulletin providing information on crop health and yields, market prices, seasonal forecasts, and flood, drought, and disease impact.
USAID and other donors support agriculture and livestock diversification and are working to improve health, education, water, nutrition, and biodiversity conservation. The international community is also working toward better harmonization of resilience and other development activities and increased testing of what works and what doesn’t work.
Opportunities for Strengthening Resilience
Research has shown that diversifying livelihoods has reduced the use of negative coping mechanisms for farming households in Uganda and that in some contexts, secondary education, cash transfers, and social capital help increase resilience to climate and health shocks. Further research on the impact of resilience activities on non-farming households and over longer periods of time would contribute to a deeper understanding of resilience in Uganda.
Featured Resources
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The region of Karamoja, located in the northeast of Uganda, is the poorest and least developed region...
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Recent research by ODI CPAN, commissioned by the USAID Center for Resilience, investigated the resilience of households above the poverty line in...
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The workshop was intended to build the capacity of resilience program and M&E staff from USAID and implementing partners (IPs) to use resilience data to inform programming decisions and to adaptively manage their projects.
Evidence and AnalysisEthiopiaSomaliaKenyaUganda -
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Join REAL and team members from USAID-funded programs in Uganda, Nepal, and Ethiopia for an interactive discussion on successes and challenges of implementing integrated resilience programming in food security activities.
Collaboration and Collective ImpactAgricultureNepalUgandaEthiopia -
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This series of cases explores central questions for practitioners interested in conducting a risk and resilience assessment. Each case explores various contexts where Mercy Corps conducted a risk and resilience assessment, the Strategic Resilience Assessment (STRESS), in Niger, Nepal and...
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Some development programs are designed on the premise that they can trigger lasting changes in poverty or food security. An intervention in eastern Uganda to increase the use of improved seed varieties and basic farming practices among women smallholders was phased out after four years due to a...
AgricultureUganda -
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Agricultural extension promotes improved inputs and more productive farming practices, which could boost food security and reduce poverty in developing countries. We evaluated how a large-scale agricultural extension program for smallholder women farmers in Uganda impacted food security....
AgricultureUganda -
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Health intersects with resilience and sustained poverty escapes in at least three ways. Poor health reduces well-being and can be a shock or stressor at the individual, household, community or systems level. It can also act as an important form of human capital, a resilience capacity that...
Sustainable Poverty EscapesHealthTanzaniaNigerMalawiEthiopiaUgandaKenyaPhilippinesNepalCambodiaBangladesh -
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The Strategy serves as a common framework for developing national and regional programmes that will be designed to enhance drought resilience through building sustainability in the IGAD region.
Collaboration and Collective ImpactKenyaEthiopiaUgandaSomaliaSouth Sudan -
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This paper applies econometric techniques for estimating household resilience in Uganda using the so-called Resilience Index Measurement and Analysis(RIMA) recently proposed by FAO (2013). It then adopts transition matrices to estimate how resilience changes over time. Finally,...
Evidence and AnalysisUganda -
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The region of Karamoja, located in the northeast of Uganda, is the poorest and least developed region in the country. Historically, Karamoja has been a pastoral area; crop production, which is less reliable there, has recently emerged as an important...
Evidence and AnalysisUganda -
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In August 2017, FAO was asked by the Commissioner for Refugees (Office of the Prime Minister of Uganda) to support the implementation of a socio-economic analysis within the refugees’ settlements and host communities, with the aim of providing a comprehensive assessment of...
Evidence and AnalysisUganda