Male vs Female Refugees in Uganda: What the Data Actually Shows

Uganda's refugee population is almost perfectly balanced by gender: as of 30 June 2026, the country hosted 179,245 female refugees compared to 177,975 male refugees — a difference of barely 1,270 people across a population of more than 357,000 registered individuals in active settlements. Despite this near-parity in numbers, men and women in Uganda's refugee settlements navigate distinctly different realities when it comes to household leadership, healthcare spending, and educational participation.

Understanding these differences matters far beyond statistics. Uganda has for years been the largest refugee-hosting country in Africa, and the policies that govern settlement life — land allocation, livelihood programmes, healthcare access — all interact with gender in ways that determine whether displaced people can rebuild stable lives. Patrick Okello, Uganda's Commissioner for Refugees, has repeatedly emphasised that sustainable integration requires programmes that account for the different starting positions of men and women.

The data drawn from the Uganda active population by settlement report for June 2026 shows a refugee population that defies common assumptions. In many global humanitarian contexts, women and children are described as the majority of displaced persons; in Uganda's current registered population, the split is close to 50/50, with women holding a marginal numerical lead.

This near-parity is itself significant. It suggests that Uganda's refugee population includes a high proportion of adult men — people who fled armed conflict, economic collapse, or persecution in the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, and other neighbouring countries, and who arrived either alone or as part of family units. It also reflects the registration practices used across settlements, where household-level enumeration captures both primary and secondary family members.

What the raw headcount does not reveal are the structural inequalities that sit beneath the surface of that 50/50 split. The broader Uganda National Household Survey 2023/24 — which covered all 135 districts and 11 cities across the country — provides national-level data that illuminates what differential outcomes look like in practice, and much of this applies directly to refugee communities embedded within Ugandan districts.

Who Leads the Household?

According to the Uganda National Household Survey 2023/24, 69 percent of Ugandan households are headed by men and 31 percent by women. Within refugee settlements, this pattern broadly mirrors the national figure, though the dynamics differ in important ways. A refugee household headed by a woman frequently indicates that the male partner did not survive the journey to Uganda, remains in the country of origin, or has separated from the family. Female-headed households in humanitarian settings often carry a compounded vulnerability: they lack a second adult earner, face higher childcare burdens, and have less negotiating power when accessing shared resources such as firewood, water points, or community-distributed food rations.

Male-headed refugee households face different pressures. The expectation that men function as primary providers does not disappear simply because a family has been displaced — if anything, it intensifies. Men who cannot generate income in a new country experience significant psychological stress, and research in displacement settings consistently links male unemployment to elevated rates of domestic conflict and mental health deterioration. Uganda's settlements offer land allocations and access to livelihood programmes, but uptake and outcomes vary considerably between men and women.

Land Access and Economic Opportunity

Uganda's open-door policy gives refugees the right to work and to cultivate land within designated settlement areas. In theory this applies equally to men and women. In practice, women in female-headed households often receive smaller plot allocations and face greater difficulty accessing credit or inputs through agricultural support programmes, because such programmes have historically been designed around assumptions of male household authority. The national labour market data from 2023/24 shows that 47 percent of employment in Uganda falls in the services sector and 40 percent in agriculture, with 30.2 percent of rural workers specifically in agricultural occupations including forestry and fishing. For female refugees who depend on small-scale cultivation as their primary livelihood, these sector-wide conditions frame what is and is not achievable.

One of the starkest gender differences visible in the national household data concerns healthcare expenditure. The Uganda National Household Survey 2023/24 found that the median monthly spending on health services for men was UGX 66,000, compared to UGX 60,000 for women — a gap of UGX 6,000 per month. Expressed as a percentage, women spend roughly nine percent less on healthcare than men.

This gap is not easily explained by women being healthier. Maternal health needs — antenatal care, delivery costs, postnatal check-ups — impose additional healthcare demands on women of reproductive age that do not affect men. A plausible interpretation is that women in Uganda, including refugee women, are rationing healthcare expenditure more severely due to lower average incomes and fewer household resources under their direct control. Women who head their own households may deprioritise their own health visits in order to direct limited funds toward children's needs.

Within refugee settlements, healthcare is largely provided through UNHCR-supported clinics and NGO-run health posts, which reduce the direct cash cost of primary care. However, referrals to secondary or tertiary facilities — for complicated deliveries, surgery, or chronic conditions — still carry costs that many families cannot absorb. The national spending gap likely understates the burden on women in settlements who have weaker financial buffers than their host-community counterparts.

Secondary School Enrolment

Perhaps the most surprising finding in the gender data concerns secondary education. According to the Uganda National Household Survey 2023/24, the Secondary School Net Enrolment Rate for women stands at 24 percent, while for men it is 22 percent. Women are marginally ahead in secondary school participation at the national level.

This represents a notable shift from the historical pattern across sub-Saharan Africa, where girls have consistently faced higher dropout rates linked to early marriage, household labour demands, and school fees. Uganda's investment in universal primary education — and, more recently, the expansion of secondary school access — appears to have narrowed and in some metrics reversed the gender gap in formal schooling.

For refugee communities, educational access at secondary level remains more constrained than these national figures suggest. Settlement schools predominantly serve primary-age children; secondary options are rarer and often require travel to nearby towns. Girls face additional barriers including distance, safety concerns on routes to school, and the expectation in some communities that adolescent girls should support household functions rather than continue studying. The fact that Uganda's national secondary NER remains at just 24 percent even for women signals how much work remains, both for the host population and for refugees who depend on the same infrastructure.

Agricultural Labour and Gendered Work Patterns

The Uganda Household Income and Expenditure Survey framework captures agricultural labour split by gender and age group: men aged 18 and over, women aged 18 and over, and children under 18. This disaggregated approach is important because it reveals not just who works in farming, but what kinds of tasks are performed by whom. Across Uganda's rural settlements — including those areas where refugees cultivate land — women typically perform a higher share of subsistence-oriented tasks such as weeding, harvesting, and food processing, while men are more likely to be involved in cash crop production or hired agricultural labour.

This division matters for income. Subsistence tasks produce food for direct consumption but generate little or no cash income, limiting women's ability to pay school fees, healthcare costs, or other monetary expenses. Cash crop work, predominantly male, feeds into market systems and provides more predictable monetary returns. For refugee women who arrived without capital, without established networks, and often without documentation of prior land rights, breaking into cash-generating agricultural activities is particularly difficult.

Uganda's approach to refugees is built on a model of integration rather than encampment. Refugees receive land, freedom of movement, and the right to work — conditions that set Uganda apart from most refugee-hosting countries in the world. This framework, described in detail in Uganda's national refugee response documentation, creates real opportunity but does not automatically neutralise gender inequality. The right to work is less valuable if social norms, childcare responsibilities, or discrimination in practice limit which work women can actually access.

Uganda divides its territory into six wildlife zones for resource management purposes — Sango Bay, Kafu, Muzizi, Aswa, Central, and Kyoga — a structure that reflects the country's broader approach to organising land and populations. Refugee settlements fit into district-level administrative frameworks that interact with these wider governance systems. For women in settlements, local district authorities and refugee coordination bodies are the practical intermediaries through which access to land, services, and protection is negotiated.

The Uganda Bureau of Statistics, accessible at www.ubos.org, publishes the household survey data that underpins much of the national-level gender analysis. The 2023/24 National Household Survey is the most recent comprehensive source, covering all 135 districts and 11 cities and providing disaggregated data on income, health, education, and labour by gender — data that applies both to the host population and to refugees who are embedded within those districts.

During multiple visits to Uganda over the past two years — including stays in January 2026 and May 2026 — the contrast between official statistics and lived reality becomes very tangible. The data on healthcare spending gaps and secondary school enrolment rates is precise and verifiable. What it does not communicate is the particular quality of daily life that those numbers describe.

In settlements and surrounding communities in southwestern Uganda, the gendered division of daily labour is visible: women carrying water and firewood, managing cooking fires, moving between small plots and shared market stalls. Men gather at trading centres, discussing access to land and transport. These are not rigid or universal patterns, but they are consistent enough to shape how development programmes must be designed if they are to reach women as effectively as men.

[QUOTE: local community worker or refugee woman on daily challenges and what support would make the biggest difference]

Uganda's refugee policy gives both men and women the same formal rights. Translating formal equality into substantive equality — in healthcare spending, in land access, in secondary school completion — is a longer and harder task. The near-perfect numerical balance between male and female refugees is a starting point, not an outcome. What happens next depends on whether programmes are designed with enough specificity to address the different structural positions that men and women occupy within settlement life.

Dimension	Male Refugees	Female Refugees
Population (Jun 2026)	177,975	179,245
Household leadership (national)	69% of households	31% of households
Median monthly health spend	UGX 66,000	UGX 60,000
Secondary school NER (2023/24)	22%	24%
Primary labour type	Cash crops, hired labour	Subsistence farming, food processing
Key vulnerability	Unemployment, provider pressure	Resource control, maternal health, childcare

The data makes one point clearly: gender parity in headcount does not mean gender equality in outcomes. Uganda's refugee settlements host men and women in almost equal numbers, but the systems around them — in healthcare, in land use, in education — produce different results for each group. Addressing those gaps is not a humanitarian abstraction. It is a practical precondition for the self-reliance that Uganda's refugee policy ultimately aims to achieve.

For deeper context on how Uganda manages its overall refugee response, the full overview of Uganda as Africa's largest refugee host provides the national policy framework within which these gender dynamics play out. Readers interested in how poverty and household vulnerability intersect with refugee status will find additional analysis in the wider poverty context for Uganda. The livelihoods of Uganda's refugees examines the economic dimensions of settlement life in more detail, including the specific challenges faced by women seeking income beyond subsistence agriculture.