Lessons from conflict: a participatory review of a Ugandan refugee project

As violence in northwest Uganda seemed to be waning in 1994, international agencies and Ugandan authorities agreed to provide Sudanese refugees with land to grow their own food. The Ikafe project ultimately fell prey to ongoing conflict and the refugees fled back to Sudan. What can we learn from its demise?

A paper published by the Humanitarian Practice Network reports on an Oxfam evaluation. Set against a backdrop of violence and confusion, which dispersed aid workers and then the refugees themselves, the report has valuable lessons for other participatory reviews of refugee resettlement schemes.

Ikafe’s objectives were ambiguous. One set of actors (the Ugandan government, the local population, UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the World Food Programme-WFP) assumed that Ikafe was a temporary settlement while another (the 55,000 refugees and aid workers from three international NGOs) wanted to keep open the possibility of not returning to Sudan in the near future. The participatory nature of the review created unrealistic expectations among stakeholders with regard to the future role of the NGOs involved.

Major findings of the review include:

• Local people complained about allocation of land to refugees and wanted to themselves benefit from infrastructure development and NGO employment.
• Refugees felt water and food provision was irregular, land of bad quality and seeds and tools delivered late.
• WFP cited insecurity on the roads and donor fatigue for irregularity of food supplies.
• Poor soil fertility and insufficiency of land, combined with disputes about ownership and control and the physical weakness of refugees (compounded by inability to provide sufficient food), ruled out prospects of food self-sufficiency.

Findings about the evaluation process included:

• Ideas concerning objective truth were questioned. Received wisdom that one can objectively attribute measurable livelihood improvements to particular actions was controversial.
• The idea of agreed immutable indicators of success was challenged. In participatory and conflictual processes predetermined impact indicators or even broad indicator themes must be handled with great care.
• The review team was large and ran the risk of accumulating an unmanageable amount of information from which no consensus could arise.
• The review took time: human and other resources were diverted from day-to-day project activities and donors were impatient for results.

Recommendations arising from the review suggest that planners of refugee settlement schemes need to:

• lobby to give refugees greater freedom of movement
• pay more attention to how to increase livelihood diversity
• make more effort to achieve self-management of services to refugees and local host populations
• ensure that a range of representatives from the host population is engaged in planning, management and review.

Source(s):
‘Participatory review in chronic instability: the experience of the Ikafe Refugee Settlement Programme, Uganda’ by Koos Neefjes, Relief and Rehabilitation Network Paper #29, March 1999 Full document.

id21 Research Highlight: 9 May 2001

Further Information:
Koos Neefjes
C7 Trung Kinh Street
Yen Hoa
Cau Giay
Hanoi
Vietnam

Tel: +84 4 784 1803
Contact the contributor: koosneefjes@hotmail.com

Humanitarian Practice Network
Overseas Development Institute
111 Westminster Bridge Road
London SE1 7JD
UK

Tel: +44 (0)20 7922 0331
Fax: +44 (0)20 7922 0399
Contact the contributor: hpgadmin@odi.org.uk

Overseas Development Institute, UK

Other related links:
The Refugee Studies Centre aims to understand the experience of forced migration from the point of view of the affected populations

ICAR focuses on the studies of conflict analysis and resolution

Refugees International serves as the voice for refugees and displaced persons

UNHCR provides protection and assistance to refugees

REFWORLD represents a comprehensive and reliable refugee information resource

Global IDP Survey reports on internally displaced persons