KAMPALA, UGANDA — When Benedict and his family arrived in Uganda from Democratic Republic of Congo in late 2024, Jesuit Refugee Services became his compass, offering more than just food aid. The English lessons he received turned a foreign place into a navigable pathway to independence. So last week’s news of the closure of the organization set him adrift.
“I don’t know what to do,” he says. “Everything has stopped. I am stuck now.”
With aid cut off, he and his wife, with their two infants and a teenage daughter, are surviving on dwindling rations, mostly rice, beans and posho, a form of corn flour. Benedict, who requested that only his first name be used for fear of being stigmatized, expects that food aid will end soon.
On his inauguration day, United States President Donald Trump issued an executive order halting all US foreign aid activities. Since then, the US Agency for International Development, which plays a core role in delivering direct aid and financing other international aid organizations, has been swiftly dismantled.
This week, all internationally-based USAID employees were abruptly called home, and nearly all workers, including those in the US, were placed on administrative leave, then told they’d be laid off. USAID’s shutdown was characterized as a 90-day pause in all foreign aid activities while the government reviewed the programs. The executive order states that US foreign aid programs “serve to destabilize world peace by promoting ideas in foreign countries that are directly inverse to harmonious and stable relations internal to and among countries.”
Uganda hosts the fourth-largest refugee and asylum-seeking population in the world and the largest in Africa. About 1.8 million refugees and asylum-seekers live in Uganda, primarily from South Sudan and DRC. A small number of those people, like Benedict and his family, live in Kampala, but most are in 13 refugee settlements spread across the country, according to the prime minister’s office, which oversees refugee services.
Uganda’s history as a refugee host dates back to its colonial era under British rule. In the early 1940s during World War II, the country hosted thousands of Polish refugees. In 1959, it hosted Tutsi refugees from Rwanda after an uprising against Rwanda’s Tutsi monarchy.
Now, an average of 2,500 people arrive each week because of continuing conflicts and climate-related issues. Between October and December 2024, nearly 35,000 people arrived in Uganda, mainly from South Sudan and DRC. So far in 2025, an additional 14,800 refugees have been registered, says Frank Walusimbi, associate communications officer at UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency in Uganda. The country’s refugee policy is unique in that it allows people to move and work freely, even use plots of land. Refugees get access to health services equal to Ugandan nationals — a benefit that is a beacon of hope for many.
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In 2024 alone, the US contributed more than 86 million dollars to humanitarian refugee programs in Uganda. These programs, however, were already strained due to dwindling funding. In 2017, UNHCR operated on a budget of almost 220 million dollars for 1.4 million refugees in Uganda alone, according to a 2024 policy brief published by the Egmont Royal Institute for International Relations, an independent, Brussels-based think tank. By the end of 2023, the organization’s budget for Uganda went down to 141 million dollars, despite a growth in the refugee population.
A UNHCR report from late 2024 shows that less than half the organization’s required 363.3 million dollars for refugee support in Uganda was secured, even as the number of people in need swelled to 1.7 million. As of Jan. 31 this year, the organization could only secure 9% of its required amount. Though US support has held steady in recent years, with the country being a top funder allocating more than 2 billion dollars in 2024 alone, overall UNHCR funding, drawn from governments around the world, dropped by 1 billion dollars from 2022 to 2023.
The funding crisis has severe humanitarian consequences. Since July 2022, critical services have been dramatically underfunded, meaning refugees struggle to access essential resources like food, water, soap, medicine, education and hygiene kits.
Global Press Journal’s request for an interview with Uganda’s Ministry of Relief, Disaster Preparedness and Refugees was not answered.
Arthur Musombwa, a program manager with the Congolese Refugee Community Center, says the apparent shutdown of USAID has left many members of his community feeling stuck, confused and hopeless, as they watch opportunities disappear. Food, health and legal services, education, financial support for startup businesses — it’s all gone, he says.
“I worry some refugees, especially the young ones, will get involved in criminal activities such as prostitution and theft,” he says.
JRS, the Jesuit organization that helped Benedict, declined to comment.
Moses Aya, a 26-year-old refugee from South Sudan, was receiving entrepreneurship training from another refugee organization with hopes of landing a 600-dollar cash grant to start a retail business in Kampala.
“I was expecting the cash good at the end of February, but the organization closed last week. Now, the hopes for both the training and cash are gone,” he says.
While Benedict was working on his English skills and trying to get a grant provided to refugees to start his retail shop in Kampala, his 16-year-old daughter Sarah, who also requested that only her first name be used, found her own path forward in JRS’ sewing program, each stitch a promise of future independence. Both were hoping to earn money that would transform their lives.
Now, Benedict wonders if Uganda can sustain the growing number of refugees entering every day. He’s especially concerned about refugees from his home country of DRC, where an extremely violent conflict is underway between the Rwanda-backed M23 armed group and the Congolese government. Thousands of people have died in the past week alone as M23 pushed into Goma, the key city in eastern DRC.
In DRC, Benedict owned a fabric shop where he stitched and sold clothes. Life was hard because of the conflict, so he and his family ran from the unpredictability of the war — only to be caught in another cycle of uncertainty in a foreign land. Benedict, like so many refugees, hopes for peace so that he can return home.
But now, he doesn’t have assurance that he’ll be able to care for his family even in Uganda.
“I don’t know what we’ll eat next week,” he says.
Nakisanze Segawa is a Global Press Journal reporter based in Kampala, Uganda.
Global Press is an award-winning international news publication with more than 40 independent newsrooms in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
