In Adjumani District, leaders are working to find more land for refugees to use for farming. They want to help refugees in the settlements who are struggling with hunger because there is not enough food.
Refugees in Pagirinya and Maaji settlements have said that they don’t have enough food because the amount of food given to them has been reduced. For a long time, refugees have depended on the World Food Program (WFP) for food, but now they are getting less help.
Richard Maku, who is responsible for refugees in Pagirinya block D, said, “Apart from getting less food, more refugees are going hungry because of the changing climate. We need to provide more land for refugees to grow their own food.”
“Some of our refugees have shown that they can grow food using a model called the Optimum Land Use Model (OLUM),” he added.
Right now, some refugees pay to use land from the local community. They pay between Shs70,000 to Shs200,000 per acre.
The Action Against Hunger (ACF) organization is also helping refugees access land through a project called the right to grow project. But even with this help, there’s still not enough land for all the refugees in the nineteen settlements.
Last year, ACF, with the support of the Adjumani local government and the Office of the Prime Minister (OPM), got more than 2,000 acres of land from landlords. But refugees and community members didn’t use all of it.
Now, Moses Lukwago, the ACF Regional Program Coordinator for West Nile, wants to make sure that refugees and the local community can grow enough food for themselves and to sell.
“We are helping them get land and giving them seeds and other things they need to farm. We are also providing advice,” he said in Adjumani District.
The Deputy Chief Administrative Officer of Adjumani, Richard Wambi, said that they are still working hard to get more land for refugees to grow food.
“We want to help and we need to talk to landlords so that they can give more land to refugees for farming,” he said.
John Sentamu Bosco, the Deputy Refugee Desk Officer in Adjumani District, is worried because the support from donors for refugees is getting smaller.
