Abraham Deng, 16, is a South Sudanese refugee who fled his
country alone in 2015 when the war – which has now gone on for three and
half years – claimed the life of his father, and an explosive blew off
his mother’s legs.
Deng is currently in Primary Six in a
school in the Nyumanzi camp, living with a friend he met in the camp,
and juggling school and menial jobs.
He weeds people’s gardens to raise his Ush9,000 ($2.48) annual school fees, charging Ush500 ($0.13) per garden. To raise the entire fees, he would have to weed at least 18 gardens.
Nyumanzi Primary School is the only one in the camp, with an enrolment of 1,583 and only nine classrooms, each accommodating over 300 pupils.
He weeds people’s gardens to raise his Ush9,000 ($2.48) annual school fees, charging Ush500 ($0.13) per garden. To raise the entire fees, he would have to weed at least 18 gardens.
Nyumanzi Primary School is the only one in the camp, with an enrolment of 1,583 and only nine classrooms, each accommodating over 300 pupils.
Bul Garang, the school headteacher, says
there are 478 pupils in Primary One alone, and the number keeps rising
as more refugees come in.
“One teacher teaches over 400 pupils and more than 100 students use one textbook,” says Garang.
Social and health needs
Officials at the Uganda country office of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) recently toured the Pigirinya, Nyumanzi and Mungula refugee camps, all in the Adjumani district in the West Nile region of northern Uganda, to assess the infrastructure, social and health needs of the asylum seekers.
Officials at the Uganda country office of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) recently toured the Pigirinya, Nyumanzi and Mungula refugee camps, all in the Adjumani district in the West Nile region of northern Uganda, to assess the infrastructure, social and health needs of the asylum seekers.
Together with Office of the Prime Minister and United Nations
High Commissioner for Refugees, UNFPA hopes to use this assessment to
determine the funding and needs of asylum seekers — especially children,
who make up 58 per cent of the refugees in the country.
More
than 40,000 new arrivals from South Sudan are recorded each month since
July 2016, with the biggest number aged below 18, according to UNFPA.
Uganda
is experiencing the fastest growing refugee crisis in world, and is now
hosting more 1.2 million refugees, who have put immense pressure on the
few services in the settlement camps.
Need for funding
Titus Jogo, the refugee desk officer in the Office of the Prime Minister stationed in Adjumani, said the generation of South Sudanese children who need to get an education is high, emphasising the need for funding to make this possible.
Titus Jogo, the refugee desk officer in the Office of the Prime Minister stationed in Adjumani, said the generation of South Sudanese children who need to get an education is high, emphasising the need for funding to make this possible.
According
to UNHCR, of the $1.4 billion requested for the South Sudanese refugees
to the end of 2017, only $649 million has been received.
About
$43 million was meant for humanitarian organisations in South Sudan
while $32 million was to help the refugees in Uganda and a further $8.6
million to fund urgent and lifesaving activities in South Sudan.
State
and host community resources like schools, health and security
services, as well as the environment are overstretched. Adjumani alone
hosts 224,318 refugees.
For young refugees like Deng,
whose ambition is to become a medical doctor and then a soldier, the
route to achieving this depends on getting better education and
livelihood, which at the present state of affairs at the refugee camps
in Adjumani cannot be guaranteed.
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