Karamoja Library

To gauge understanding of how KRSU’s work benefits and is utilized in Karamoja, a rapid review was conducted in November and December 2023. The review involved face-to-face interviews with a number of the organization’s partners – including non-governmental organizations (NGOs), universities, academics, and donors.

This analysis is motivated by the concerns of international donors and other stakeholders regarding the persistent challenges in advancing educational outcomes for the majority of the population in the Karamoja sub-region of Uganda. Substantial improvements in enrolment and retention rates in Karamoja have occurred over the past eight years, but these remain significantly behind the national average, and drop-out rates after primary school are extremely high, especially for female students.i This analysis uses existing primary and secondary data to investigate various approaches for education in the sub-region.

Water and rangeland resources are the basis for livestock production in pastoralist areas of Africa and therefore have major impacts on pastoral livelihoods. Households with insufficient access to water or productive rangeland experience suboptimal herd growth and production, with associated negative impacts on the income and nutritious foods that livestock provide.

An effective early warning system (EWS) is a prerequisite for timely response to avert and mitigate the impacts of disasters that affect pastoralist and agro-pastoralist communities. Whereas there exist various forms of EWS in Uganda, the main concerns have been whether the early warning information is timely, accurate, accessible, and elicits early action. These questions point at inefficiencies in the conventional EWS in the country and the importance of the indigenous early warning system (IEWS) used by rural communities. These indigenous systems are especially important where conventional early warning information is inaccessible or coarse and therefore not suitable for guiding location-specific decisions.

This real-time review aims to document the events that led to Karamoja’s hunger crisis in 2022, the reporting of the worsening situation by early warning systems, and the responses of the Government of Uganda and the international aid community. The review took place from the September 27–October 21, 2022.

In July 2022 the Ugandan media reported that 900 people had died of hunger or hunger-related diseases in the Karamoja sub-region since February 2022, and that 8 out of 10 households had limited or no food.i

After nearly 10 years of relative peace, conflict and insecurity returned to the Karamoja sub-region of northeastern Uganda starting in 2019. This assessment investigates this resumption of conflict and insecurity from the perspective of the communities most involved and affected.

This knowledge synthesis focuses on violent conflict in the Karamoja sub-region of northeastern Uganda. While violence and conflict both can and do take many forms, this synthesis takes as its focus the phenomenon of cattle raiding and associated violence. This knowledge synthesis briefly describes the concept and role of cattle raiding within pastoral societies in East Africa and the Karamoja Cluster and then examines different historical periods and experiences of violent conflict associated with cattle raiding within the Karamoja sub-region.

This scoping report investigates barriers, benefits, and “terms of inclusion” for girls’ education in the Karamoja sub-region of Uganda. Karamoja has some of the lowest education indicators in the country, with females generally faring much worse than males. The report examines the experiences and perceptions of girls, male and female community members, and teachers about girls’ education in the region, drawing on an assessment that took place from June to August 2022 in 10 sites in four districts: Amudat, Kaabong, Moroto, and Napak.

This briefing paper presents learnings from global, and specifically East African, experience to support concerned stakeholders in thinking transformatively about education inclusion in Karamoja. While Karamoja is also home to agriculturalists, this paper focuses specifically on education among those pursuing livelihoods as pastoralists and agro-pastoralists, and particularly on the education of girls in those communities.

This report summarizes planned humanitarian and development activities of major donors in the Karamoja sub-region

In mid-2020, the Karamoja Resilience Support Unit (KRSU) conducted a rapid assessment that described the impact of COVID-19 containment measures on rural livelihoods in Karamoja (Arasio et al. 20201). The assessment also forecast how disease restrictions would affect livelihoods over the following six to eight months (into early 2021). The initial assessment examined household wellbeing during COVID-19 relative to a normal (good) and bad (drought) year in Karamoja’s three main livelihood zones, represented by Amudat District (predominantly pastoralist but with some emerging crop production), Moroto District (predominantly agropastoralist), and Abim District (with high dependence on crop production, but also using livestock).