By Changez Ali
For The Diamondback
Uganda has a refugee population of more than 600,000 and it’s growing every day.
As the country deals with the influx of refugees arriving from war-torn areas like South Sudan, University of Maryland doctoral candidate Catherine Nakalembe is monitoring the impact Uganda’s refugee resettlement policies have on environmental sustainability.
Nakalembe returned from Uganda last month after breaking new ground in the field of climate-oriented sustainable development. She helped create the first comprehensive map of a refugee settlement using an unmanned aerial vehicle.
The technique was adapted by Nakalembe by using agricultural remote sensing technology that provides up-to-date information on the layout of the Oruchinga refugee settlement — home to about 8,000 people, according to Nakalembe — and its encroachment on surrounding shrub-lands and wildlife areas.
Uganda’s 2006 Refugee Act provides refugees with land on which they can grow food, work or set up businesses.
“Uganda has declared lands as ‘officially gazetted’ for refugees in some of the districts and such lands are protected whether or not refugees reside on it,” a United Nations High Commission for Refugees report stated.
According to the World Bank, this policy “empowers refugees to become gainfully employed, self-sufficient, and to live in dignity.”
But this land may also be susceptible to climate issues.
“The maps allow us to gain an insight into how land is being used, its potential for harvesting crops and to what extent it is at risk from climate change,” said Charlie Yaxley, the external relations officer at the commission.
The information from the map of Oruchinga will allow organizations to work with communities to manage the land, “while minimizing the potential risk of environmental degradation and to enhance soil fertility,” Yaxley said.
The information the government had before was out of date, Nakalembe said.
“[Government authorities] had no mapping of the settlement,” she said. “The map that they have was, I think, drawn in 1960. It was very obvious that they had no useful data that they could use on a daily basis.”
Nakalembe’s last two weeks in Uganda were spent in country’s northern region, at Bidi Bidi refugee camp — one of the largest in Uganda with more than 200,000 people, according to Nakalembe — where future mapping will be carried out.
“One of the biggest problems they have now [in Bidi Bidi] is fuel, for cooking,” Nakalembe said. “You have 200,000 more people who need to cook, who need firewood. What’s going to happen to the neighboring shrub-land? We think the only way to make this sustainable is if you can get the government to use actual data.”
Nakalembe, who is from Uganda, said she is “strategically positioned” to do this work because of her education and her ability to relate to people in Uganda.
“I see things differently because [of] being educated here, having grown up there, and having access to all these tools and people,” she said.
Nakalembe plans to return to Uganda in the near future to continue her work, creating a synergy between this university’s agricultural monitoring resources and fieldwork in Uganda.
“Catherine Nakalembe’s work in Uganda in many ways epitomizes the kind of ethos that UMD strives to nurture in its students,” said Joe Scholten, associate director at the university’s international affairs office, “an entrepreneurial mindset that notices a real world problem and takes it on in a way that is innovative but also attentive to the cultural context.”
