Mahassin Mohammed Ibrahim was cooking a meal for her family in the Sudanese city of El Fasher when her front door swung open, and a hand grenade clattered to the ground. The ensuing blast showered the room with shrapnel, leaving the 39-year-old bleeding on the floor. Members of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group fighting the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), stormed in.
“They asked us for money and the keys to our car outside,” Mahassin said, sitting on a straw mat in the safety of Uganda’s Kiryandongo refugee settlement. “They didn’t care if we were dying or not.”
While her son, mother and brother escaped with minor injuries, Mahassin was rushed to a hospital with a shattered arm and life-threatening shrapnel wounds to her abdomen and legs.
After 3 weeks, as soon as the injuries were somewhat healed, Mahassin and her family decided to flee El Fasher on a donkey cart. The besieged city, located in Sudan’s western Darfur region, is housing hundreds of thousands of trapped civilians at risk of starvation and violence.
“We were lucky to get out,” Mahassin said. “We told the soldiers at the checkpoint that we lived in a village just outside town and they let us go.”
Around 2 weeks later, the family managed to cross the border into Uganda via South Sudan. She is now housed in a tent in the settlement’s reception centre, where the EU’s partner UNHCR registers hundreds of newly arrived refugees every day. Here they are also paired up with essential services, such as healthcare, water and sanitation, and psychosocial care.
Since the beginning of the year, Uganda has received close to 120,000 individuals, including a heavy influx of Sudanese fleeing the war. To date, there is no end in sight to the 18-month conflict that has so far killed tens of thousands of people, displaced more than 11 million and triggered the world’s largest hunger crisis.
Accounting for over 1/3 of the total number of new arrivals in Uganda, most Sudanese refugees arrive in Kiryandongo, where they now number over 45,000. Like Mahassin, many of them have undertaken a gruelling journey filled with hardship and danger. Well in the settlement, they receive humanitarian assistance, including food, shelter, and healthcare.
Uganda is the largest refugee-hosting country in Africa with almost 1.7 million people fleeing war and natural disasters from across the continent. At the same time, it has one of the most unique refugee policies in Africa – and perhaps the world.
Refugees are granted access to land, schooling, health care, vocational training, and jobs. However, with a steady influx of refugees and resources increasingly limited, services have become overstretched.
Meanwhile, the level of global humanitarian assistance to Uganda has decreased over the years.
“The EU has allocated over €36 million in aid for 2024,” said Bruno Rotival, who oversees humanitarian programmes in Uganda. “But while we compete with other acute crises, such as Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan, we are still confident that we will be able to maintain all our support. This includes responding to the influx of new refugees and other emergencies, such as floods and the recent outbreak of the Mpox virus.”
The EU-supported humanitarian organisations in Kiryandongo provide food, education, medical care, and other critical aid. The many schools and health facilities that have sprung up in the settlement and other remote rural areas hosting refugees are also used by the local population.
“Overall, we provide refugees and the Ugandan host communities with the same services,” Bruno said. “We also aim to increase the role of local organisations in responding to crises.”
As the tropical Ugandan sun reaches its zenith, Mahassin Mohammed Ibrahim is getting ready to cook a simple lunch on a small bed of coals.
“I don’t know if I can ever return,” she says, stirring a pot of rice. “But it is the only thing I can think about.”
