Refugee Children in Uganda: How Many Are There and What Conditions Do They Face?

Children under 18 years of age make up approximately 40 percent of Uganda's total refugee population, placing well over 700,000 minors inside the country's settlements and urban refugee communities. According to UNHCR data from June 2026, Uganda was hosting around 1.8 million refugees in total, making the child cohort one of the largest concentrations of displaced minors anywhere in Africa. The scale is rarely reflected in headlines, yet it shapes almost every policy decision Uganda makes about education, health care, and land allocation in its settlements.

During multiple visits to southwestern and western Uganda between 2024 and 2026 — including stays in January and May 2026 — this author observed the daily realities that dry statistics cannot fully capture: crowded classrooms where a single teacher faces sixty children, health posts where the shelves hold only a fraction of the medicines listed on the wall, and reception zones where families continue to arrive in numbers that test the limits of existing infrastructure.

As of May 2025, Uganda hosted over 1.9 million refugees and asylum seekers, according to the Food Security and Nutrition Assessment carried out that year. This made Uganda the largest refugee-hosting country in Africa by absolute numbers — a distinction it has held for several years. The total recorded by UNHCR in its 2024 annual mapping stood at 1,796,609, spread across fourteen major settlements and a significant urban population centered on Kampala.

The three main countries of origin are South Sudan (53 percent), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (33 percent), and a combined group of Sudan, Eritrea, Somalia, Burundi, Rwanda, and Ethiopia (14 percent). Since January 2025 alone, a cumulative total of 110,849 new asylum applications were received, of which 60 percent came from DRC, 26 percent from South Sudan, and 13 percent from Sudan. The DRC share rising to 60 percent of new arrivals reflects the continued deterioration of security in eastern Congo.

Where Refugees Are Located

Uganda distributes its refugee population across a network of settlements concentrated in the north and southwest of the country. The largest individual settlements by registered population in 2024 were:

• Adjumani — 228,295 people (northern Uganda)
• Bidibidi — 212,517 people (northern Uganda)
• Palorinya — 204,034 people (northwestern Uganda)
• Imvepi — 159,149 people (northwestern Uganda)
• Rwamwanja — 169,468 people (western Uganda)
• Rhino — 144,730 people (northern Uganda)
• Nakivale — 137,838 people (southwestern Uganda)
• Kyangwali — 137,020 people (western Uganda)
• Kyaka II — 132,526 people (western Uganda)
• Kiryandongo — 100,187 people (central Uganda)
• Palabek — 86,195 people (northern Uganda)
• Kampala urban — 70,330 people

Smaller settlements include Lobule (6,276) and Oruchinga (8,044). Given the 40 percent under-18 share documented across the settlement system, these figures translate into tens of thousands of children at every major settlement. Adjumani alone, at over 228,000 residents, would contain more than 91,000 children by that ratio.

Uganda's policy formally allows refugee children to enroll in national schools alongside Ugandan children. In practice, the gap between policy and access is significant. The Uganda National Household Survey 2023/24 — a comprehensive study covering all 135 districts and 11 cities — found that 23 percent of children nationally were not attending school because education was considered too expensive. This figure reflects the combined burden of school fees, uniforms, exercise books, and transport costs that pushes many families — refugees and Ugandans alike — to keep children at home.

The structural reason behind this cost barrier becomes clearer when set against labor market data. In northern Uganda, where the majority of the largest settlements are located, the employment-to-population ratio in refugee strata was only 23 percent, compared to 34 percent for host communities in the same region. In southwestern Uganda the figures were 31 percent for refugees versus 42 percent for hosts. In the Kampala urban refugee community the ratio was 23 percent versus 57 percent for the broader urban population. When fewer than one in four working-age adults in a refugee household has any employment, the decision not to pay school-related costs is not a lack of ambition — it is economic necessity.

The Education Workforce and Its Limits

Uganda's education sector employs 396,960 workers and generates value added of approximately 4,225,374 million Ugandan shillings, according to national accounts data. That is a substantial workforce on paper. Inside refugee settlements, however, the distribution of those teachers is far from even. Settlements that doubled in population within a single year — as happened in parts of northern Uganda following surges of arrivals from South Sudan and DRC — often waited months before new classrooms or additional teachers were deployed.

The Multidimensional Child Poverty framework applied in Uganda recognizes education not just as school attendance but as learning outcomes and continuity. Children who arrive mid-year, speak neither English nor Luganda, and have missed months or years of schooling due to displacement face a compound disadvantage that raw enrollment numbers do not reveal. Uganda's policies — including the provision of land parcels and the right to work — are among the most progressive on the continent, but they cannot by themselves bridge the gap between physical access to a school and meaningful participation in education.

Among the most difficult statistics in the OVC (Orphans and Vulnerable Children) Monograph Census 2024 Report is the finding that, on average across children aged 0–17 in Uganda, 8.7 per 1,000 children did not know the survival status of one or both of their parents. For refugee children, who have often been separated from family members during flight, the actual rate of parental separation or unknown status is likely considerably higher.

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, specifically Article 7(1), establishes that children should know their parents and be cared for by them, and should not be separated unless they are not being properly cared for. The same report notes that orphanhood patterns in northern Uganda have shifted over the last twenty years as conflict declined — yet emerging causes of orphanhood need to be identified. For displaced communities, those causes include ongoing armed conflict in origin countries, deaths during the journey, and the long-term consequences of untreated chronic illness in settlement conditions.

Childcare as Unpaid Work

One aspect of child welfare that rarely appears in headline statistics is the volume of unpaid childcare work performed within refugee households. In settlements where adult employment rates are low and formal childcare infrastructure is limited, the burden of caring for younger siblings often falls on older children — particularly girls in early adolescence. This childcare responsibility is one of the documented drivers of school dropout among older girls, creating a cycle in which one generation of children sacrifices its own education to support another.

Unpaid care work is structurally invisible in most labor surveys but is acknowledged in Uganda's National Household Survey framework as a distinct economic activity. When valued at market rates, the unpaid childcare performed inside settlements represents a substantial contribution to household welfare that is currently provided at the direct expense of the caregivers' own development opportunities.

The health conditions facing refugee children in Uganda are directly shaped by a persistent and widening funding gap. According to the UNHCR Underfunded Indicators Tracking Dashboard for Q4 2025, the total health sector requirement under Uganda's Comprehensive Refugee Response Plan was USD 134 million. The amount actually received was USD 29.4 million — roughly 22 percent of what was needed.

The consequences are visible in service quality data. The Food Security and Nutrition Assessment (FSNA) 2025 found that 73.1 percent of health facilities in refugee settlements reported drug stockouts. Long waiting times — the proportion of patients reporting excessive waits at health facilities — increased from 30.4 percent in 2024 to 45 percent in 2025. Eight health partners including CARE, DCA, HI, IRC, MTI, UNFPA, UNHCR, and UNICEF reported activities in the health sector, but their combined resources fell far short of demand.

Under-Five Mortality: Improving but Uneven

Under-five mortality rates across Uganda's refugee settlements, while still a concern, have shown an improving trend over recent years as tracked through the District Health Information System. Quarterly data from 2023 through 2025 showed national-level rates hovering between 0.07 and 0.21 deaths per 1,000 population per quarter. Variation across individual settlements remains significant, with some settlements consistently performing better than others depending on the presence of functional health facilities and staffing levels.

The broader health picture for Uganda's population is also shifting. The UNHS 2023/24 found that approximately 21 percent of the population reported having suffered an illness or injury in the month before the survey, an increase of two percentage points from 19 percent in the 2019/20 survey. In settlement contexts, illness rates tend to be elevated relative to the national average due to crowding, water access limitations, and nutritional stress.

The inflow of new refugees and asylum seekers has not slowed. UNHCR's Critical Indicators Tracking Matrix from June 2026 documents conditions at a reception center where 5,327 individuals arrived between January 2025 and the reporting date. Daily averages of 35 new arrivals were recorded, with a peak of 140 in a single day. At the time of reporting, the center was accommodating 298 individuals against a design capacity of 500 — operating at roughly 60 percent of capacity, though with variable pressure depending on daily intake.

Water coverage at the same facility met the minimum standard of 15 liters per person per day, and latrine and bathing coverage showed no significant gaps. Shelter, however, remained a concern: the available space per person was 3.5 square meters against a holding capacity of 430 individuals, with a reported accommodation space that was not yet operating at full capacity. These figures describe a reception point, not a permanent settlement — conditions improve substantially for families once they are moved to established settlements and allocated land plots.

For children specifically, the reception phase is among the most disorienting. Families may spend days or weeks in transit conditions before registration is complete and they are assigned to a settlement. During that period, access to education, regular health care, and psychosocial support is limited. Uganda's Office of the Prime Minister, which coordinates refugee management alongside UNHCR and implementing partners, has worked to shorten registration and relocation timelines — but the pace of new arrivals from DRC and South Sudan continues to test the system.

Uganda operates one of the most open refugee policies in the world, granting refugees the legal right to work, move freely within the country, and access national services including public schools and health facilities. This stands in contrast to camp-based systems used in neighboring countries, where movement restrictions and work prohibitions are common. The policy framework is the reason Uganda can document children in classrooms rather than solely in confined camps.

The Self-Reliance Strategy embedded in Uganda's refugee response recognizes that sustained dependence on humanitarian aid is neither desirable nor sustainable. With the education sector employing nearly 400,000 workers nationally and generating enormous value for the economy, expanding genuine access for refugee children represents both a social investment and an economic one. A child educated in Uganda is more likely to contribute to Uganda's economy — whether they eventually repatriate or remain — than a child who spends their childhood outside any school system.

You can read about the broader structure of Uganda's refugee response in our overview of Uganda as Africa's largest refugee host, and the specific challenges facing children living in Uganda's refugee settlements. The food security dimension — directly affecting child nutrition — is examined in depth in our analysis of food security in Uganda's refugee settlements in 2026.

The 40 percent under-18 share is not a temporary artifact of a single crisis year. It reflects the demographic reality of populations that have experienced sustained displacement: high birth rates within settlements, the continued arrival of families with young children, and the fact that many of Uganda's refugee communities have now been in place for a decade or more. Bidibidi, which opened in 2016 following a surge of South Sudanese arrivals, already has a generation of children who were born inside its boundaries and have never known any other home.

Understanding the scale of child displacement in Uganda requires holding two facts simultaneously. First, Uganda's open policy and the presence of schools, clinics, and allocated land create conditions that are substantially better than what children face in many other displacement contexts globally. Second, the gap between what is needed and what is funded — documented most starkly in the USD 104.6 million health funding shortfall in 2025 — means that children in settlements face structural disadvantage in education and health that compounds over time. A child who misses three years of school due to cost barriers at age seven does not simply catch up at ten.

The Uganda Bureau of Statistics (www.ubos.org) publishes national household survey data that includes a dedicated chapter on refugee households, allowing comparisons between refugee and host community conditions over time. The 2023/24 survey is the most recent comprehensive source, covering nine thematic chapters from demographics through financial inclusion. For researchers and policymakers, it remains the definitive national dataset on household conditions — and it confirms that the refugee experience in Uganda, while more dignified than in many contexts, remains materially harder than life in host communities by almost every measure.

The personal experience of visiting settlements across multiple trips — including extended stays in January 2026 and May 2026 — reinforces what the data shows. The children in these communities are not passive recipients of aid. They attend school when they can, work alongside parents when they cannot, and demonstrate the adaptability that long-term displacement demands. Their numbers are large, their needs are documented, and the gap between those needs and available resources is a matter of political and financial choice as much as logistics.